WE CAN ONLY HOPE ANTI VAXXERS DON'T FIND OUT

Ebola vaccine regimen generates strong immune response in children and adults in a clinical trial in Sierra Leone

Results support the use of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine regimen for Ebola virus disease prevention

Peer-Reviewed Publication

LONDON SCHOOL OF HYGIENE & TROPICAL MEDICINE

Johnson & Johnson’s two-dose Ebola vaccine regimen is safe, well tolerated and produces a strong immune response in people over the age of one, according to two new papers published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

The EBOVAC-Salone study provides important further evidence for the potential of the regimen using the Ad26.ZEBOV and MVA-BN-Filo vaccines to be used as a protective measure against Ebola virus disease for both children and adults.

Conducted in Sierra Leone, the study is the first to assess the safety and tolerability of this vaccine regimen in a region affected by the 2014-2016 West African Ebola outbreak, which was the worst on record. It is also the first study reporting the evaluation of this vaccine regimen in children.

The research in  Kambia district was a collaboration between the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and Sierra Leone's College of Medicine and Allied Health Sciences (COMAHS) under the EBOVAC11 project.

The authors found that the vaccine regimen was well tolerated and induced antibody responses to Zaire ebolavirus 21 days after the second dose in 98% of participants, with the immune responses persisting in adults for at least two years.

During the 2014-16 outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, 28,652 cases and 11,325 deaths from Ebola were reported. Approximately 20% of cases were in children under 15 years, and children younger than five years are at a higher risk of death than adults.

First author on the paediatric paper, Dr Muhammed Afolabi, Assistant Professor at LSHTM, said: “This study represents important progress in the development of an Ebola virus disease vaccine regimen for children, and contributes to the public health preparedness and response for Ebola outbreaks.

“Working in tandem with Sierra Leone colleagues and the local communities, this is the first published study to evaluate this two-dose vaccine regime in a randomised controlled trial in children. The results show that this vaccine regimen has the potential to save many young lives.”

The clinical trial recruited participants from September 2015 to July 2018. The study was divided into two stages. In stage one, which aimed to gain initial information about the vaccine regimen’s safety and immunogenicity, 43 adults aged 18 years or older received the Ad26.ZEBOV vaccine followed by the MVA-BN-Filo vaccine after 56 days. In stage two, 400 adults and 576 children and adolescents (192 in each of the three age cohorts of 1-3, 4-11 and 12-17 years of age) were vaccinated with either the Ebola vaccine regimen (Ad26.ZEBOV followed by MVA-BN-Filo) or a single dose of a meningococcal quadrivalent conjugate vaccine followed by placebo on day 57. Adults participating in stage one of the study were offered a booster dose of A26.ZEBOV two years after the first dose which induced a strong immune response within seven days.

Co-first author on the adult paper, Dr Daniela Manno from LSHTM, said: “To protect people from Ebola, we will need a range of effective interventions. These findings support the additional strategy of providing an Ad26.ZEBOV booster to previously immunised individuals at the start of an Ebola virus disease outbreak.”

The study findings have already contributed to the approval and marketing authorisation of the two-dose Ebola vaccine regimen in July 2020 by the European Medicines Agency, for use in both children and adults. It also contributed to the WHO Prequalification in April 2021, which will facilitate formal registrations of this vaccine regimen in countries at risk of Ebola virus disease outbreaks.

In 2021, the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) on Immunization for the World Health Organization (WHO) made a recommendation in support of using both the Johnson & Johnson’s two-dose Ebola vaccine regimen as well as an Ebola vaccine manufactured by Merck (the rVSV-ZEBOV-GP) during outbreaks for individuals at risk of Ebola exposure and preventively, before outbreaks, for national and international first responders.

Professor Deborah Watson-Jones, from LSHTM, said: “The threat of future Ebola virus disease outbreaks is real and it’s important to remember that this disease has definitely not gone away. Despite the additional global challenges around COVID-19, we must not slow down efforts to find effective ways of preventing Ebola virus epidemics and, should outbreaks occur, of containing them rapidly. Vaccines have a key role in meeting both of these objectives.”

Professor Sir Brian Greenwood, one of the trial investigators from LSHTM, said: “This is an example of crucial research which brings together scientists from Africa with partners in the north and pharmaceutical companies to tackle a major public heath threat in Africa.”

Professor Mohamed Samai, Deputy Vice Chancellor, University of Sierra Leone, and Dean of COMAHS, said: “COMAHS was proud to be a key partner in this important trial, whose results have the potential to protect the population of Sierra Leone, neighbouring countries and beyond from this terrible disease.”

In May 2021, Johnson & Johnson announced it would donate thousands of Ebola vaccine regimens in support of a WHO early access clinical programme launched in response to an outbreak in Guinea and aimed at preventing Ebola in West Africa. The programme began by vaccinating health workers, other frontline workers and others at increased risk of exposure to the Ebola virus in Sierra Leone. To date, more than 250,000 individuals participating in clinical trials and vaccination initiatives have received at least the first dose of the Johnson & Johnson Ebola vaccine regimen, including 200,000 who have been fully vaccinated. Further studies are being carried out in Sierra Leone to investigate whether the vaccines are safe and induce immune responses among infants aged under one year, and to follow up the adult and child participants over five years to assess the potential for long term protection.

The research team faced many challenges in carrying  out the trial in the course of an epidemic, including the fact there was no electricity, no laboratories and limited medical facilities. They worked closely with the local community as they experienced the Ebola outbreak and its aftermath to enrol participants and keep track of as many as possible to obtain follow-up data, as well as setting up mobile clinics and in rented houses.

The authors acknowledged some limitations of the study including the fact there were more men than women in the adult trial, the measurement of Ebola antibody concentration levels in only a subset of participants and the booster dose only being offered to participants in the stage 1 phase of the trial. The study also focused only on safety and immunogenicity because by the time the study was implemented the West Africa Ebola outbreak had been brought under control, which meant it was not possible to evaluate the efficacy of the vaccine regimen.

This project has received funding from the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking under grant agreement No [115854, 115850 and 115847]. This Joint Undertaking receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and EFPIA. Funding was also provided by Johnson & Johnson.

***ENDS***

For media enquiries, please contact press@lshtm.ac.uk

Publication details

Muhammed Afolabi et al. Safety and immunogenicity of the two-dose heterologous Ad26.ZEBOV and MVA-BN-Filo Ebola vaccine regimen in children in Sierra Leone: a randomised, double-blind, controlled trial. Lancet Infectious Diseases.

David Ishola and Daniela Manno et al. Safety and long-term immunogenicity of the two-dose heterologous Ad26.ZEBOV and MVA-BN-Filo Ebola vaccine regimen in adults in Sierra Leone: a combined open-label, non-randomised stage 1, and a randomised, double-blind, controlled stage 2 trial. Lancet Infectious Diseases.

Copies of the papers are available on request.

Post-embargo links for the papers: 

Adult study - http://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(21)00125-0/fulltext 

Children study -  http://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(21)00128-6/fulltext

Notes to Editors

The EBOVAC1 consortium brings together leading global research institutions and non-government organisations including the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson, Inserm, the University of Oxford, World Vision, Grameen Foundation and GOAL, as well as Sierra Leone's Ministry of Health and Sanitation. These partners are working with support from the European Union's Innovative Medicines Initiative Ebola+ programme.

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JOURNAL

The Lancet Infectious Diseases

Can cocoa consumption help us age better?

Grant and Award Announcement

MEDICAL COLLEGE OF GEORGIA AT AUGUSTA UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: DR. YANBIN DONG view more 

CREDIT: MIKE HOLAHAN, AUGUSTA CHRONICLE

AUGUSTA, Ga. (Sept. 14, 2021) – Whether consuming cocoa, known to be packed with powerful antioxidants that protect our cells from damage, helps us age better, is a question scientists want to definitively answer.

They are looking for answers in the blood of 600 individuals age 60 and older who participated in the largest trial ever to assess the impact of a cocoa supplement as well as a common multivitamin, on reducing the risk of heart disease, stroke, cancer and other health outcomes, says Dr. Yanbin Dong, geneticist and cardiologist at the Georgia Prevention Institute at the Medical College of Georgia.

The COSMOS Trial (COcoa Supplement and Multivitamin Outcomes Study), led by investigators at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, gathered data from 21,444 men and women looking at the impact of a cocoa extract supplement and/or multivitamins on common health problems, most of which increase with age.

Dong just received a $3 million grant (1RO1HL157665-01) from the National Institutes of Health to perform detailed analysis of inflammatory factors and genetic changes associated with aging to see if cocoa consumption reduces those factors.

Cocoa products have become a “widely consumed food” with still growing demand and increasing interest in their anti-aging potential, Dong says.

“People think the consumption of chocolate is good for you,” says Dong, adding that worldwide enthusiasm for the sweet treat has outpaced the scientific evidence of its benefit in humans.

Chocolate is widely considered beneficial because it has a high content of flavanols, antioxidants known to produce a powerful anti-inflammatory response. In fact, flavanols are the major ingredient, particularly in dark chocolate and cocoa is a purer form of chocolate, says Dong.

There is no question flavanols are good for you, the questions are how much and in what way they are good for you, he says. 

While there has been evidence in cell cultures, animal models and even some relatively small human studies of the anti-inflammatory might of cocoa, there had not been large scale randomized controlled trials, scientific studies in which a large number of participants are randomly assigned into different study arms that include some participants getting a placebo and/or different treatment, often whatever is considered the current treatment standard.

Dong notes that there also is not solid evidence that multivitamins, the most commonly used supplement, which is widely associated with benefits like reduced cancer risk, are of benefit either.

While he doesn’t dispute the biological plausibility that both chocolate and multivitamins should have some health benefit, he says solid scientific evidence should be behind what we choose to put in our bodies with the goal of improving our health.

“We are going to prove or dispute it,” he says, and the size and duration of the COSMOS Trial is enabling him to do both.

Dong and his colleagues will be looking specifically at aging, including so called “inflammaging,” and epigenetic aging, both considered good indicators of our biological age. Rather than just looking at the year you were born, biological age also takes into account key factors that impact your function and health, like genetics and lifestyle. He also has more standard aging measures on these individuals, like blood pressure and cognitive function tests.   

Inflammation is a major factor in aging and common conditions such as heart attack, stroke, Alzheimer’s and cancer, and “inflammaging” has been characterized as chronic, low grade inflammation that likely increases the risk of these inflammation-related conditions.

Epigenetic changes, like DNA methylation, which can be good or bad and can result from environmental exposures, including the foods we eat, are changes to the physical structure of DNA which impact gene expression and ultimately what our genes do, including deactivating them. Epigenetic changes are now considered a powerful predictor for life- and healthspan, as well as susceptibility to disease and death, Dong says.

Dong will be analyzing levels of key pro- and anti-inflammatory factors at baseline, and year one and two of the COSMOS Trial in the blood of those taking the cocoa supplement, a multivitamin, both or neither. He’ll also be doing sophisticated, extensive genetic analysis looking for gene changes that correlate with aging, and using “epigenetic clocks” that can calculate biological age based on the amount of DNA methylation.

His work will have the added benefit of better defining any benefit of multivitamins, a top supplement used by many only because they think it is good for them.

Inflammaging can be objectively assessed by measures like blood levels of C-reactive protein, a sort of biomarker of inflammation, which is made by the liver and can increase dramatically with inflammation. Dong likens C-reactive protein levels, which physicians regularly measure, to a Geiger counter for the immune response. He’ll also be assessing levels of tumor necrosis factor alpha, which as the name implies, is an inflammatory cytokine that attacks cancer and other invaders, but can be problematic at elevated levels. He’ll also be measuring levels of anti-inflammatory markers like interleukin-10, or IL 10, then exploring interaction between inflammaging and epigenetic aging, like whether the genes regulating IL-10 expression also increase DNA methylation and whether when blood pressure decreases, it reduces inflammation or changes methylation first.   

The investigators central hypothesis is that cocoa supplementation reduces epigenetic aging and inflammaging, consequently reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease, the nation’s number one killer which tends to increase in incidence at age 65 and older. If they find inflammaging and cardiovascular disease indicators are reduced, they want to know if it’s reductions in epigenetic changes driving the improvements.

Particularly dark chocolate is regularly touted for its health benefits as a natural and good source of antioxidants as well as iron, copper and other things good for your heart and health. Eating chocolate has been reported to lower cholesterol, blood pressure, cognitive decline and boost the immune response to invaders like the coronavirus, Dong says.

Food and beverage items like grapes and red wine, tomatoes, onions, berries and peaches also are considered good sources of flavanols.

Surveys indicate the majority of American adults use a dietary supplement, with female use higher than male use and overall usage increasing with age, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Multivitamins are a favorite supplement.

Dong’s collaborators on the new studies include COSMOS principal investigators  Dr. JoAnn E. Manson and Dr. Howard D. Sesso from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard University.

People only pay attention to new information when they want to

Peer-Reviewed Publication

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS USA

A new paper in the Journal of the European Economic Association, published by Oxford University Press, indicates that we tend to listen to people who tell us things we’d like to believe and ignore people who tell us things we’d prefer not to be true. As a result, like-minded people tend to make one another more biased when they exchange beliefs with one another. 

While it would reasonable to think that people form decisions based on evidence and experience alone, previous research has demonstrated that decision makers have “motivated beliefs;” They believe things in part because they would like such things to be true. Motivated beliefs (and the reasoning that leads to them) can generate serious biases. Motivated beliefs have been speculated to explain the proliferation of misinformation on online forums. Such beliefs may also explain stock market performance. There’s a great deal of objective information available about financial marketplaces, yet group decision making and encouragement (e.g. the Game Stop stock performance of winter 2021) may result in bubbles and financial instability.

Researchers here used laboratory experiments to study whether such biases in beliefs grew more severe when people exchanged these beliefs with one another. The researchers paired subjects based on their score on an IQ test such that both members either both had scores above the median or both had scores below the median. The subjects then exchanged beliefs concerning a proposition both wanted to believe was true: that they were in the high IQ group.

The experiment revealed that people who are pessimistic that they are in the high IQ group tend to become significantly more optimistic when matched with a more optimistic counterpart. An optimistic person is not, however, likely to change his beliefs if matched with a more pessimistic counterpart. This effect is particularly strong for people who are in the low IQ group, where it produces particularly severe biases. Overall, the results suggest that bias amplification occurs because people (selectively) attribute higher informational value to social signals that reinforce their pre-existing motivation to believe.

Halfway through the experiment, however, researchers gave subjects an unbiased piece of information about which IQ group subjects were in. This was highly effective at removing the biases caused by the initial exchange of beliefs. The results therefore suggest that providing unbiased, reliable sources of information may reduce motivated beliefs in settings like echo chambers and financial markets.

“This experiment supports a lot of popular suspicions about why biased beliefs might be getting worse in the age of the internet,” said Ryan Oprea, one of the paper’s authors. “We now get a lot of information from social media and  we don't know much about the quality of the information we're getting. As a result, we're often forced  to decide for ourselves how accurate various opinions and sources of information are and how much stock to put in them.  Our results suggest that people resolve this quandary by assigning credibility to sources that are telling us what we'd like to hear and this can make biases due to motivated reasoning a lot worse over time."

The paper “Social Exchange of Motivated Beliefs” is available (at midnight on Sep 14th ) at: https://doi.org/10.1093/jeea/jvab035.

To request a copy of the study, please contact:
Daniel Luzer 
daniel.luzer@oup.com

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JOURNAL

Journal of the European Economic Association

DOI

10.1093/jeea/jvab035 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Social Exchange of Motivated Beliefs

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

14-Sep-2021

 

Jet stream changes could amplify weather extremes by 2060s

Drilling deep into the Greenland Ice Sheet, researchers reconstructed the jet stream's tumultuous past and found that climate-caused disruptions are likely to have drastic weather-related consequences for societies on both sides of the Atlantic

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

 

IMAGE: UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH ASSOCIATE MATTHEW OSMAN STEADIES AN ICE CORE DRILLING BARREL INTO THE GREENLAND ICE SHEET SNOW SURFACE. view more 

CREDIT: SARAH DAS/WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION

New research provides insights into how the position and intensity of the North Atlantic jet stream has changed during the past 1,250 years. The findings suggest that the position of the jet stream could migrate outside of the range of natural variability by as early as the year 2060 under unabated greenhouse gas emissions, with potentially drastic weather-related consequences for societies on both sides of the Atlantic.

Led by Matthew Osman, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Arizona Climate Systems Center, the study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS.

Familiar to air travelers flying between North America and Europe, the North Atlantic jet stream is the ribbon of prevailing westerly winds circling the Arctic. Often called the "polar jet," these high-altitude winds impact weather and climate across eastern North America and western Europe, accounting for between 10% and 50% of variance in annual precipitation and temperature in both regions. However, little is known about how the jet stream varied during the past, or how it might change in the future.  

Osman's research team collected glacial ice core samples from nearly 50 sites spanning the Greenland ice sheet to reconstruct changes in windiness across the North Atlantic dating back to the eighth century.  The reconstructions suggest that natural variability has thus far masked the effect of human-caused warming on mid-latitude atmospheric dynamics across annual and longer timescales.

"For most places on Earth, direct climate observations typically do not span more than a few decades," Osman said. "So, we haven't had a great sense of how or why the jet stream changes over longer periods of time. What we do know is that extraordinary variations in the jet stream can have severe societal implications, such as floods and droughts, due to its impacts on weather patterns and so, in terms of thinking about the future, we can now begin to use the past as a sort of prologue."

The work reveals that although natural variability has largely controlled the position of the North Atlantic jet stream, continued warming could cause significant deviations from the norm. In particular, model projections forecast a northward migration of the North Atlantic jet stream under 21st-century warming scenarios. Such migration could render the jet stream significantly different within a matter of decades.

CAPTION

University of Arizona postdoctoral research associate Matthew Osman and U.S. Ice Drilling Program specialist Mike Waszkiewicz move an ice core barrel into place on the Greenland Ice Sheet.

CREDIT

Sarah Das/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Although the polar jet stream blows most swiftly near the typical cruising altitudes of planes, the band of winds actually extends all the way to the ground. While of lesser intensity, Osman explained, near the ground it is often referred to as storm tracks. Storm tracks impact weather and climate across Greenland, affecting the island's precipitation and temperature changes. By analyzing year-to-year variations in the amount of snowfall archived in Greenland ice cores, as well as the chemical makeup of the water molecules comprising those annual snow layers, the researchers were able to extract centuries-old clues into how the jet stream changed.

"These layers tell us about how much precipitation fell in a given year and also about the temperatures that airmasses were exposed to," Osman said.

Weather events like this summer's heat wave in the Pacific Northwest and the floods in Europe are some recent examples of how the jet stream affects weather patterns based on its intensity or location in the short term, Osman said. But societally significant changes also occur across longer time scales; reconstructing the jet stream's past revealed that in some years, it could be far north, only to venture more than 10 degrees farther south a few years later.

CAPTION

View looking down an ice coring borehole atop the Greenland Ice Sheet. Most of the core samples studied came from depths as deep as 300 – 1,000 feet below the ice surface.

CREDIT

Sarah Das/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

"Such variations have huge implications on the types of weather that people might experience at a given place," Osman said. "For example, when the jet stream is situated further south, the normally dry Iberian Peninsula tends to experience milder, moister conditions. But, as the jet stream migrates northward, much of that moisture also moves away from Iberia towards already-wet regions of Scandinavia. A poleward-shifted jet stream in the future thus might have similar, but more permanent, consequences."

The team was able to match certain changes in wind speed and geographical shifts to historical weather-related calamities. For example, during a famine that gripped the Iberian Peninsula in 1374, the jet stream was situated unusually far north. Similarly, two famine events in the British Isles and Ireland in 1728 and 1740 coincided with years that winds blew at nearly half their usual intensity, dramatically cooling temperatures and reducing precipitation. The latter of these events, in 1740, is estimated to have cost the lives of nearly half a million people.

Osman and his co-authors expect that any future shifts in the North Atlantic jet stream would also have dramatic implications on day-to-day weather and ecosystems, with trickle-down effects impacting national economies and societies.

"Our results serve as a warning: Although pushing the jet stream beyond its natural range would be problematic, its ultimate trajectory is still largely in our control," he said.

CAPTION

Clouds along a jet stream over Canada. Banded cirrus clouds running perpendicular to the jet stream—a telltale feature photographed by an astronaut aboard Space Shuttle Discovery.

CREDIT

NASA

The research paper, "North Atlantic jet stream projections in the context of the past 1,250 years," is co-authored by Sloan Coats at the University of Hawaii; Sarah B. Das at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts; and Joseph R. McConnell and Nathan Chellman at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada. https://www.pnas.org/content/118/38/e2104105118   

CAPTION

In this visualization, which uses weather and climate observations from NASA's MERRA dataset, the Northern Hemisphere's polar jet stream is seen as a meandering, fast-moving belt of westerly winds that traverses the lower layers of the atmosphere.

CREDIT

NASA

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JOURNAL

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2104105118 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

North Atlantic jet stream projections in the context of the past 1,250 years

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

13-Sep-2021

COI STATEMENT

None

 

Cyclones starve North Atlantic seabirds

Peer-Reviewed Publication

CNRS

 

IMAGE: ATLANTIC PUFFIN view more 

CREDIT: © DAVID GRÉMILLET

Every winter, thousands of emaciated seabird carcasses are found on North American and European shores. In an article published on the 13 September in Current Biology, an international team of scientists including the CNRS1 has shown how cyclones are causing the deaths of these birds. The latter are frequently exposed to high-intensity cyclones, which can last several days, when they migrate from their Arctic nesting sites to the North Atlantic further south in order to winter in more favourable conditions. After equipping more than 1,500 birds of the five main species concerned (Atlantic puffins, little auks, black-legged kittiwakes, and two species of guillemots) with small loggers2 and by comparing their movements with the trajectories of cyclones, the scientists were able to determine the degree of exposure of the birds to these weather events. By modeling the energy expenditure of birds under such conditions, the study suggests, surprisingly, that the birds do not die from increased energy expenditure, but as a result of their inability to feed during a cyclone. The species studied are particularly unsuited to fly in high winds and some cannot dive into a stormy sea, preventing them from feeding. Trapped during a cyclone, these birds will starve if the unfavourable conditions persist beyond the few days that their body reserves allow them to survive without food. As the frequency of severe cyclones in the North Atlantic increases with climate change, seabirds wintering in this area will be even more vulnerable to such events.

CAPTION

Flight of a little auk equipped with a GLS system (eastern Greenland).

CREDIT

© David Grémillet

Notes

 

1 – Among those who took part in the study are scientists from the Centre d'écologie fonctionnelle et évolutive (CNRS/Université de Monptellier/IRD/EPHE), the laboratory Littoral, environment et societies (CNRS/La Rochelle Université) and the Centre for biological studies of Chizé (CNRS/La Rochelle Université).

The following major international structures took part (among others): the University of Wisconsin, the Norwegian Polar Institute and the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research.

2 - GLS (Global Location Sensor) tags are tiny tracking devices weighing around 1g, capable of recording light levels in the vicinity of the bird, allowing the position of the equipped individual to be calculated. Though less accurate (range of about 200 kilometres) than a GPS device, these loggers require little energy and have a long life span. They are placed on the metal rings that scientists put on the birds’ leg.

 

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JOURNAL

Current Biology

DOI

10.1016/j.cub.2021.06.059 

ARTICLE TITLE

North Atlantic winter cyclones starve seabirds

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

13-Sep-2021

 

Utilitarian approach to global climate policy improves equity, environment and wellbeing

Peer-Reviewed Publication

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY

An approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions that is informed by the ethical theory of utilitarianism would lead to better outcomes for human development, equity, and the climate, according to a new study involving Rutgers researchers.

The study, published in Nature Climate Change, proposes a practical way of measuring how different nations should reduce carbon emissions in order to maximize wellbeing in the world, according to Mark Budolfson, a philosopher and assistant professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health and Justice at the Rutgers School of Public Health.

“Utilitarianism tells us to care about everyone’s wellbeing, and to care just the same about each of us” says Dean Spears, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin, a corresponding author along with Budolfson and an international team of researchers “When we do that, we learn that tackling climate change requires different ambitions of different countries, because countries around the world start from different places with different resources.”

While nations pledged in the 2015 Paris Agreement to mitigate carbon emissions, governments have since failed to agree on their individual responsibility, partly due to the lack of an agreed method for measuring what emissions reductions should be expected from different nations with very different resources.

The study identifies a method of measuring equity that is simple, appealing, and transparent, where this method of assessing equity can be implemented in a wide range of climate policy assessment models and discussions.

“Simplicity can be an advantage in discussions and negotiations. And a minimal conception of equity that is as uncontroversial as possible may also be an advantage, given that more robust and complex conceptions of equity have led to deep disagreements,” says Budolfson, who is also a member of Center for Population-Level Bioethics and the Rutgers Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research.

The researchers propose assigning different carbon emission reduction goals to different nations, based on the country’s wealth and ability to grow and maintain their citizen’s health and well-being. 

“The key insight is that when emissions are allocated to where they do the greatest good, in poorer nations, global welfare increases and we do a better job of limiting emissions,” says Navroz K. Dubash, professor at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.

The researchers use a computer model to solve for the distribution of emissions reductions across the world that would maximize wellbeing, weighing the interests of every citizen of the world equally. In this sense, their method has a straightforward utilitarian goal and a straightforward utilitarian concept of equity at its core that drives its calculations, together with estimates of impacts that focus on wellbeing rather than simply dollars of GDP. The authors take into account not only the wellbeing impacts of direct harms from climate change, but also the wellbeing impacts of the costs of reducing emissions.

The authors suggest that this straightforward utilitarian approach captures much of what is important from an equity point of view, and it also allows for simple and transparent calculations of what should be done when equity is taken into account.

The researchers say the utilitarian approach corrects an important structural bias within policy analysis by focusing on wellbeing impacts and not just on economic outcomes.  

“Previous analyses of climate policy sometimes get off on the wrong foot by relying on simple dollar-based goals like maximizing global GDP and thus ignore the importance of vast inequalities in income throughout the world,” adds Budolfson. “Measurements based only on dollars do not consider that a dollar sacrificed by a poor country subtracts more wellbeing than a dollar sacrificed by a wealthier country. Our method has estimates of the wellbeing impacts of a dollar of emissions reduction for a poor nation versus a dollar of emissions reduction cost for a rich nation. It is important to set up the analysis correctly in this way so that we measure wellbeing impacts rather than simply dollar impacts. We also set up the analysis so that the goal is to find the policy that best promotes wellbeing, rather than the one that maximizes the total dollar value of global wealth or GDP. We believe this is an improvement in policy analysis, and one that removes what is otherwise an all-too-common structural bias against the poor.”

The authors say utilitarianism is ethically minimal because it requires only that each person’s interests count equally and that policy should promote wellbeing.

“A utilitarian approach can be implemented in many of the ongoing climate change debates. It is easy to use in a wide variety of settings where transparency is important. And it has the advantage of prioritizing human wellbeing looking into our future, complementing analyses that call on historical responsibility for past emissions,” says Kevin Kuruc, an economist at the University of Oklahoma. 

The utilitarian benchmark creates an equitable model that reallocates emissions constraints and allows poorer regions the opportunity to continue economic development.

“This results in increased human development and standards of living for the global poor,” says Budolfson.

Budolfson, Spears, Dubash, and Kuruc conducted the study with Francis Dennig from Yale-NUS, Frank Errickson from Princeton University, and David Anthoff from University of California at Berkeley.

The paper, Utilitarian benchmarks for emissions and pledges promote equity, climate, and development, first appeared online in Nature Climate Change on 13 September 2021.

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JOURNAL

Nature Climate Change

DOI

10.1038/s41558-021-01130-6 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Computational simulation/modeling

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Utilitarian benchmarks for emissions and pledges promote equity, climate and development

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

13-Sep-2021

 

Uncertainty on climate change in textbooks linked to uncertainty in students

Peer-Reviewed Publication

NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY

A new study from North Carolina State University suggests textbook wording that portrays climate change information as uncertain can influence how middle and high school students feel about the information, even for students who say they already know about climate change and its human causes.

The study, published in the journal Environmental Education Research, has implications for how teachers can prepare students to face misinformation about climate change.

“I thought students’ knowledge or social norms surrounding climate change would buffer them from misinformation,” said study author K.C. Busch, an assistant professor of STEM education at NC State. “But it didn’t matter how much knowledge students had; they did not react to the text differently. That’s problematic. We think that if we could improve students’ knowledge, they can integrate that knowledge in the real world to sniff out misinformation or disinformation that’s being presented to them. That didn’t happen.”

In the study, Busch surveyed 453 students in California about how certain they felt about climate change before and after they read one of two articles about climate change. The articles’ wording suggested either low or high uncertainty about climate change.

Busch took the high uncertainty text directly from an earth science textbook published in 2008 in California. For the other reading, she adapted the textbook language to remove uncertainty. For example, she changed “not all scientists agree about the causes of global warming” to “97% of scientists agree about the causes of global warming.”

“The cleanup of what I’ll call the ‘bad text’ was actually super slight,” Busch said. “It was so slight that I was almost thinking that it wasn’t going to have any effect whatsoever. This study showed strategies that are subtly used to cue the reader did have an effect.”

Although students in both groups began the experiment with similar average certainty about climate change, students’ certainty changed after reading the texts. The survey students took used a four-point scale, with 4 meaning students were “extremely sure” climate change is caused by people, and 1 meaning they were “not at all sure.”

For students who read the text framing climate change as uncertain, average certainty decreased from a 2.81 to a 2.67 average on the four-point scale. Meanwhile, students’ certainty increased from an average of 2.89 to 3.16 if they read a text that used a more straightforward wording.

Before the study, the students reported that, on average, they were knowledgeable about the causes and effects of climate change, and very sure it was caused by humans. They were also moderately concerned about climate change, and confident they could do something about it. However, Busch saw that knowledge and beliefs of students and of the people in their social circle didn’t have a statistically significant impact on how students reacted to the textbook information.

The findings built on a previous study that found language in four sixth grade textbooks adopted in California presented climate change as uncertain in terms of whether it will happen, as well as its human causes. Busch said that there are other signs that climate change topics are absent or mistreated in classrooms. A report from the National Center for Science Education found 10 states received a grade of D or worse for their standards for climate change education, and that included some of the country’s most populous states.

“We chose a sixth grade text for this study, and my son was in sixth grade at that time. This was the textbook that he had in his science classroom,” she said. “Textbooks last in classrooms forever, so it very well could still be in circulation.”

But beyond replacing textbooks, Busch said it could be that educators need to teach students about the process and language that scientists use to describe their conclusions to help them evaluate information in real-time, as well as to bolster their ability to critically evaluate information and misinformation.

“My recommendations for education are teaching more basic skills, including an understanding of how science is done and the language of science and certainty,” Busch said. “Science has often been presented as a book of canonical, established fact. We need students, and the general public, to have a stronger understanding of the scientific process.”

More research is needed to understand how teens use their outside knowledge, beliefs and the beliefs of their friends and relatives to evaluate climate change information, Busch said. Other studies have found that social norms – such as the beliefs and attitudes of their friends and family members – can be very influential for teens, and can predict how accepting young people are of climate change. It could be that the students in the study saw the survey as a test, and it may not reflect their actual views.

The study, “Textbooks of Doubt, Tested: The Effect of a Denialist Framing on Adolescents’ Certainty about Climate Change,” was published online Sept. 9, 2021, in Environmental Education Research. It was funded with a research fellowship from the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Research Fellowship and with a research grant from Stanford Graduate School of Education.

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Note to editors: The abstract follows.

“Textbooks of Doubt, Tested: The Effect of a Denialist Framing on Adolescents’ Certainty about Climate Change”

Authors: K.C. Busch

Published online in Environmental Education Research on Sept. 9, 2021.

DOI: 10.1080/13504622.2021.1960954

Abstract: In U.S. school settings and materials, climate change is often framed as an uncertain phenomenon. However, the effect of such denialist representations on youth’s perceptions of climate change has not been empirically tested. To address this gap in the literature, this paper reports on a survey-based experiment testing two framings of uncertainty about the causes and effects of climate change—one with a high level of uncertainty and one with a low level of uncertainty—on students’ knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors related to climate change. The experiment was conducted with 453 middle and high school students within the San Francisco Bay Area of California, U.S. Students who read a text portraying climate change with high uncertainty reported lower levels of certainty about human-caused climate change (β = −0.426, SE = 0.081, p < 0.001, 95% CI [−0.589, −0.266]). To explore how the students engaged cognitive resources when reading the experimental texts, regression analyses were used to test two hypotheses. The Knowledge Thesis predicts that youth will use their prior knowledge to evaluate the text, and the Norms Thesis predicts that youth will use the perceived norms of their social group to evaluate the text. Results suggested that students did not respond to the treatment differentially, given their differing levels of prior knowledge (β = −0.125, SE = 0.165, p = 0.449, 95% CI [−0.448, 0.199]) nor social norms accepting of climate change (β = −0.123, SE = 0.115, p = 0.286, 95% CI [−0.350, 0.104]). Thus, these results suggest that participants passively accepted the framing present in the text. Implications for practice include the necessity of explicit instructional scaffolds to support students in deep critical engagement with informational, or dis-informational, text about climate change.

 

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JOURNAL

Environmental Education Research

DOI

10.1080/13504622.2021.1960954 

ARTICLE TITLE

“Textbooks of Doubt, Tested: The Effect of a Denialist Framing on Adolescents’ Certainty about Climate Change”

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

9-Sep-2021