Post-pandemic emission reductions offer a glimpse into the future of monsoon rains, study finds

Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences

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How will climate patterns change after carbon neutrality?

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Credit: Xiaochao Yu

The dramatic, pandemic-driven slowdown in human activity provided a unique natural experiment for climate scientists. New research, leveraging climate models from that event, now projects that a sustained push for carbon neutrality will fundamentally reshape global monsoon patterns, leading to a more balanced distribution of vital rains after a complex, multi-decade adjustment.

The study, published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, used projections from the CovidMIP project, which was initially designed to simulate the climate impacts of the temporary drop in greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions during the COVID-19 lockdowns. By extending this concept, an international team explored the long-term consequences of permanent emission reductions in pursuit of carbon neutrality goals.

They found that the path to carbon neutrality will unfold in two distinct phases for global land monsoon precipitation (GLMP)—a critical resource for water, agriculture, and ecosystems for billions of people.

The research team, led by scientists from the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences, identified a near-term paradox. "In the 2030s, we see a paradoxical effect," explained corresponding author Dr. Hua Zhang. "Rapid cuts in aerosol emissions, which have a short-lived heating effect, cause a temporary increase in the rainfall imbalance between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, which is similar to the abrupt change we studied during the COVID-19 pandemic."

This phase is driven by the swift climatic response to cleaner air. However, the climate models show that this imbalance is temporary. By the 2040s, the long-term, cumulative effects of reducing greenhouse gases (GHGs) become dominant, working to weaken the hemispheric temperature contrast and stabilize circulation patterns.

"Our analysis of this CovidMIP mitigation path reveals a critical transition," said Dr. Zhang. "While the immediate response to aerosol reduction may temporarily intensify rainfall asymmetries, persistent GHG mitigation ultimately leads to a more stable and balanced global monsoon system. The pandemic gave us a short-term test case; our study confirms the profound, long-term benefits of staying the course on the path to carbon neutrality."

The study concludes that while the initial phase may present new climatic risks, the long-term outcome is a significant reduction in hemispheric rainfall asymmetry, which would lower the risk of extreme droughts and floods in vulnerable monsoon regions.

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Journal

Advances in Atmospheric Sciences

DOI

10.1007/s00376-025-4475-9 

Article Title

Decreased Interhemispheric Asymmetries of Global Land Monsoon Precipitation toward the Carbon Neutrality Goal

Article Publication Date

5-Nov-2025

Vegan diet can halve your carbon footprint, study shows

Vegan diet cuts carbon emissions by 46% and land use by 33%, while delivering nearly all essential nutrients

Frontiers

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Only around 1.1% of the world's population is vegan, but this percentage is growing. For example, in Germany the number of vegans approximately doubled between 2016 and 2020 to 2% of the population, while a 2.4-fold increase between 2023 and 2025 to 4.7% of the population has been reported in the UK. Many people cite health benefits as their reason to go vegan: moving from a typical Western diet to a vegan one can lower the risk of premature mortality from noncommunicable diseases by an estimated 18% to 21%.

Another excellent reason is to reduce your ecological footprint. Now, a study in Frontiers in Nutrition has calculated precisely how much plant-based diets like veganism lower emissions and the use of natural resources. It likewise showed that such diets deliver practically all essential nutrients.

"We compared diets with the same amount of calories and found that moving from a Mediterranean to a vegan diet generated 46% less CO2 while using 33% less land and 7% less water, and also lowered other pollutants linked to global warming," said Dr Noelia Rodriguez-Martín, a postdoctoral researcher at the Instituto de la Grasa of the Spanish National Research Council now based at the University of Granada, and the corresponding author of the new study.

Rodriguez-Martín and the research team composed four week-long sets of nutritionally balanced daily menus, including breakfast, a mid-morning snack, lunch, and dinner. Each diet was designed to deliver 2,000 kilocalories per day, with servings and a composition based on recommendations of the Spanish Society for Community Nutrition, the Spanish Vegetarian Union, the European Food Safety Authority, and the US National Academy of Medicine.

Healthy lives on a healthy planet

The baseline was a healthy omnivorous Mediterranean diet, rich in fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and lean protein, with moderate amounts of fish, poultry, and meat. Two others were pesco-vegetarian and ovo-lacto-vegetarian, respectively including fish and seafood or eggs and dairy, but without meat. The fourth was vegan, where all animal-based foods had been replaced by plant-based alternatives such as tofu, textured soy protein, tempeh, soy yogurt, seeds, or legumes.

The researchers used public databases like the Spanish BEDCA (Base Española de Datos de Composición de Alimentos) and FoodDate Central of the US Department of Agriculture to calculate each menu's content of macronutrients, as well as of 22 vitamins and essential micronutrients, for example linoleic and linolenic acid, various forms of vitamin B, calcium, iron, and selenium. They compared these with daily intakes as recommended by international health organizations, separately for women and men, either 30 to 51 years old or 51 to 70 years old.

They also estimated the total ecological footprint of each menu, comprising a slew of key ecosystem impact indicators ranging from climate change and ozone depletion to water eutrophication and ecotoxicity, based on the public database AGRIBALYSE 3.1.1.

The results showed that 'cradle-to-home' total greenhouse gas emissions dropped from 3.8kg per day of CO2 equivalents for the omnivorous diet through 3.2kg per day for the pesco-vegetarian diet and 2.6kg per day for the ovo-lacto-vegetarian diet, to 2.1kg per day for the vegan diet – a reduction by 46%.

A similar pattern was found for water use – dropping by 7% from 10.2 cubic meters of water for the omnivorous diet to 9.5 cubic meters for the vegan diet – and for agricultural land occupation, falling by 33% from 226 to 151 points on a weighted environmental impact score associated with land use, expressed per day of diet. Interestingly, the vegan diet showed reductions of more than 50% in key ecosystem impact indicators compared to the omnivorous baseline, along with a greater than 55% decrease in disease incidence.

"Our analyses showed that all three plant-based menus were nutritionally balanced, with only vitamin D, iodine and vitamin B12 needing a bit more attention. Overall, the indicators clearly highlight the environmental and health advantages of plant-based diets compared with the omnivorous baseline," said Rodriguez-Martín.

Food for thought

"But in our four-way comparison – omnivorous, pesco-vegetarian, ovo-lacto-vegetarian and vegan – the pattern was clear: the more plant foods, the smaller the ecological footprint. The pesco-vegetarian menu showed moderate gains, though fish production adds some environmental costs. Vegetarian diets also performed well, cutting carbon emissions by about 35%."

But for those who wish to help the planet but are not prepared to give up animal-based foods entirely, the authors have an equally important message.

“You don’t need to go fully vegan to make a difference. Even small steps toward a more plant-based diet reduce emissions and save resources. Every meal that includes more plants helps move us toward healthier people and a healthier planet,” concluded Rodriguez-Martín.

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Journal

Frontiers in Nutrition

DOI

10.3389/fnut.2025.1681512 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Nutrient Adequacy and Environmental Foot-Print of Mediterranean, Pesco-, Ovo-lacto-, and Vegan Menus: A Modelling Study

Article Publication Date

11-Nov-2025

 

Personalized interactions increase cooperation, trust and fairness

Kobe University

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A new setup for social games suggests that when people are given the freedom to tailor their actions to different people in their networks, they become significantly more cooperative, trusting and fair.

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Credit: Kobe University, created with material from Alexander Kaufmann, Amanda Jones, Heather Gill, Max Harlynking, Paola Aguilar, Rita Chou, Style Studio and Tim Mossholder via Unsplash

A new setup for social games suggests that when people are given the freedom to tailor their actions to different people in their networks, they become significantly more cooperative, trusting and fair. The international study with Kobe University participation thus argues that many standard experimental setups of cooperation underestimate people’s prosocial potential.

Games that are models of social interactions are used in sciences spanning from sociology and anthropology to psychology and economics, giving us very concrete data on how likely it is that people behave in a certain way in certain social contexts. For example, when modeling how people cooperate in social networks, one such game shows that only roughly one in seven people end up being cooperative in the long run. “Most experiments on games on networks, however, assume that players must act uniformly toward everyone in their network and overlook the capacity of humans to actively manage their social networks,” says Kobe University computational social scientist Ivan Romić.

Together with Danyang Jia and Zhen Wang at the Northwestern Polytechnic University in Xi’an, Romić therefore designed an experimental setup that allows players to choose different actions towards their various neighbors in the prisoner’s dilemma and the trust and ultimatum games, games that model social cooperation and fairness. They then recruited over 2,000 university students across China to play these games and varied the fraction of players who could choose their actions freely, allowing the researchers to find out how the freedom they afford their study participants influences the results.

In the journal Nature Human Behaviour, they published a paper rich with results. “In the prisoner’s dilemma, cooperation rates rose from just 14% in constrained populations to over 80% when everyone had full agency. Trust and fairness showed similar improvements. Even in mixed populations where only some players had agency, the prosocial effects were substantial, although they also produced temporary spikes in inequality as free players learned to use their flexibility,” summarizes Romić. Importantly, when all players were free to tailor their behavior, inequality decreased even as overall wealth increased.

The team also looked at how this behavior developed over time as the games were played repeatedly. Jia, who coauthored the study, says: “We found that players with more freedom expressed their prosocial tendencies right from the first round. This wasn’t just about learning over time but about having the capacity to act differently from the start. We also found that as players gained agency, populations shifted toward conditional and prosocial behavioral types, such as tit for tat cooperators and generous trustors. Constrained players, by contrast, tended to default to antisocial strategies — not necessarily because they were selfish, but because the environment limited their options.”

The team thus argues that many standard experimental setups of cooperation underestimate people’s prosocial potential by artificially restricting how social decisions are made. Their findings highlight the need for behavioral experiments to reflect the realities of social interaction, specifically that individuals often tailor their actions to different people in their networks, for capturing the true dynamics of social behavior. Romić adds, “More generally, this suggests that equal opportunity to individualize one’s interactions benefits prosocial behavior.”

This research was funded by the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars (grant 62025602), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grants U22B2036, 62476221, 62366058), the Tencent Foundation, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (grants JP24K16333, JP25K01452), the National Fund of Philosophy and Social Science of China (grant 62473252) and the Shanghai Pujiang Program (grant 23PJ1405500). It was conducted in collaboration with researchers from the Northwestern Polytechnical University, the Yunnan University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the Ministry of Education of China, Shanghai Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Control and Management, Yunnan University, Aalto University and China Telecom Corp Ltd.

Kobe University is a national university with roots dating back to the Kobe Higher Commercial School founded in 1902. It is now one of Japan’s leading comprehensive research universities with over 16,000 students and over 1,700 faculty in 11 faculties and schools and 15 graduate schools. Combining the social and natural sciences to cultivate leaders with an interdisciplinary perspective, Kobe University creates knowledge and fosters innovation to address society’s challenges.

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Journal

Nature Human Behaviour

DOI

10.1038/s41562-025-02289-0 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Social networking agency and prosociality are inextricably linked in economic games

Dreaming of fewer running injuries? Start with better sleep

University of South Australia

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Recreational running is one of the world's most popular sports, but it also carries a high injury risk, particularly for those who are poor sleepers.

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Credit: University of South Australia

If you are among the 620 million people who lace up their running shoes on a regular basis, chances are that you’re an early riser.

Hopefully, you will have got at least eight hours of good sleep the night before, otherwise your risk of injury skyrockets.

That’s the finding from a new study led by Professor Jan de Jonge, a work and sports psychologist at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, and an Adjunct Professor at the University of South Australia.

In a survey of 425 recreational runners, Prof de Jonge and his team found that those reporting shorter sleep duration, lower sleep quality, and more sleep problems were nearly twice as likely to sustain an injury.

The findings, published in Applied Sciences, provide “compelling evidence that sleep is a critical yet often overlooked component of injury prevention,” according to Prof de Jonge.

“While runners specifically focus on mileage, nutrition and recovery strategies, sleep tends to fall to the bottom of the list,” he says.

“Our research shows that poor sleepers were 1.78 times more likely to report injuries than those with stable, good quality sleep, with a 68% likelihood of sustaining an injury over a 12-month period.

“That’s a strong reminder that how well you rest is just as important as how hard you train.”

Recreational running is one of the world’s most popular sports, but it also carries a high injury risk, with up to 90% of runners experiencing an injury at some stage, costing the world economy millions of dollars each year in work absences and medical expenses.

The study is among the first to investigate sleep as a multidimensional factor in relation to sports injuries, considering not just duration, but also quality and sleep disorders.

“Sleep is a vital biological process that allows the body and mind to recover and adapt to the physical and mental demands of training,” Prof de Jonge says.

“When sleep is disrupted or insufficient, the body’s ability to repair tissues, regulate hormones and maintain focus diminishes, all of which can increase injury risk.”

The research found that runners who regularly experienced sleep problems such as trouble falling asleep, waking frequently during the night, or not feeling rested upon waking, were particularly vulnerable to injury.

In contrast, those with consistent sleep duration and good sleep quality reported fewer injuries.

Prof de Jonge says the findings have important implications for both recreational and competitive athletes, coaches, and health professionals.

“We often assume that more training equals better performance, but that’s not necessarily the case.”

“Runners – especially those balancing training with work, family and social commitments – may actually need more sleep than average adults to recover properly. Sleep should be treated as a performance priority, not an afterthought.”

Experts recommend that people should aim for between seven and nine hours of sleep per night, with athletes often needing more rest, including daytime naps, to aid mental and physical recovery.

Consistent bedtimes, minimising screen use before bed, reducing caffeine and alcohol content, and creating a quiet, cool sleep environment should be all be prioritised.

“Sleep quality and sleep duration are both important, but quantity often provides the bed-rock. Sleep should be recognized not only as a recovery tool, but also as a potential predictor of injury vulnerability in recreational sports.”

‘Sleep Matters: Profiling Sleep Patterns to Predict Sports Injuries in Recreational Runners’ is published in Applied Sciences. DOI: 10.3390/app151910814

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Journal

Applied Sciences

DOI

10.3390/app151910814 

Method of Research

Survey

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Sleep Matters: Profiling Sleep Patterns to Predict Sports Injuries in Recreational Runners’