Videos: Protests, gunfire in oil-rich, restive Iran province

By JON GAMBREL
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Protesters angry over water shortages marched through streets late Thursday in an oil-rich, restive province in southwestern Iran and police apparently fire weapons to disperse the crowds, online videos showed.

It wasn’t immediately clear if anyone had been wounded or arrested in the protests across multiple cities in Khuzestan province, including its capital, Ahvaz. Iranian state media had not reported on the unrest as of early Friday morning.

Videos showed people setting fire to tires, blocking roadways in anger. Anti-riot police in helmets and camouflage fatigues scuffled with demonstrators. Police also fired shotguns in one video, though it wasn’t clear if it was live ammunition or so-called “beanbag rounds” designed to be less lethal.

Those in the videos chanted in Arabic, demanding others to join them. The province is home to ethnic Arabs who complain of discrimination by Iran’s Shiite theocracy.

Arab separatists long have operated in Khuzestan, which Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein tried to seize in his 1980s war with Iran. They’ve blown up oil pipelines in the past and have been blamed for attacks including a 2018 assault on a military parade that killed at least 25 people in Ahvaz.

Water worries in the past have sent angry demonstrators into the streets in Iran. The country has faced rolling blackouts for weeks now, in part over what authorities describe as a drought striking the nation. Precipitation had decreased by almost 50% in the last year, leaving dams with dwindling water supplies to fuel the country

The protests in Khuzestan province come as Iran struggles through repeated waves of infections in the coronavirus pandemic and as thousands of workers in its oil industry have launched strikes for better wages and conditions.

Iran’s economy also has struggled under U.S. sanctions since then-President Donald Trump’s 2018 decision to unilaterally withdraw America from Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers, crashing the value of the Islamic Republic’s rial currency.

CLIMATE EMERGENCY PHOTO ESSAY
Europe floods: search for missing goes on as toll tops 90

By FRANK JORDANS

1 of 16
A regional train sits in the flood waters at the local station in Kordel, Germany, Thursday July 15, 2021 after it was flooded by the high waters of the Kyll river. (Sebastian Schmitt/dpa via AP)


BERLIN (AP) — The death toll from devastating floods across parts of western Germany and Belgium rose above 90 on Friday, as the search continued for hundreds of people still unaccounted for.

Authorities in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate said 50 people had died there, including at least nine residents of an assisted living facility for people with disabilities.

In neighboring North Rhine-Westphalia state officials put the death toll at 30, but warned that the figure could rise further. Some 1,300 people were still reported missing, though authorities said efforts to contact them could be hampered by disrupted roads and phone connections.

In a provisional tally, the Belgian death toll has risen to 12, with 5 people still missing, local authorities and media report early Friday.

The flash floods this week followed days of heavy rainfall which turned streams and streets into raging torrents that swept away cars and caused houses to collapse across the region.

Chancellor Angela Merkel and U.S. President Joe Biden expressed their sorrow over the loss of life during a news conference at the White House late Thursday.

The long-time German leader, who was on a farewell trip to Washington, said she feared that “the full extent of this tragedy will only be seen in the coming days.”

Rescuers were rushing Friday to help people trapped in their homes in the town of Erftstadt, southwest of Cologne, where several houses were at risk of collapse after floodwaters laid bare the foundations.

Three people were rescued from the Wurm River in Heinsberg county late Thursday.

The governor of North Rhine-Westphalia state, Armin Laschet, has called an emergency Cabinet meeting Friday. The 60-year-old’s handling of the flood disaster is widely seen as a test for his ambitions to succeed Merkel as chancellor in Germany’s national election on Sept. 26.

The German army has deployed 900 soldiers to help with the rescue and clear-up efforts.

Thousands of people remain homeless after their houses were destroyed or deemed at-risk by authorities, including several villages around the Steinbach reservoir that experts say could collapse under the weight of the floods.

Across the border in Belgium, most of the drowned were found around Liege, where the rains hit hardest. Skies were largely overcast in eastern Belgium, with hopes rising that the worst of the calamity was over.

‘I numb myself’: Hospital fire deepens Iraq’s COVID crisis

By ABDULRAHMAN ZEYAD and SAMYA KULLAB

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A coronavirus patient receives treatment at a hospital in Najaf, Iraq, Wednesday, July 14, 2021. Infections in Iraq have surged to record highs amid a third wave spurred by the more aggressive delta variant, and long-neglected hospitals suffering the effects of decades of war are overwhelmed with severely ill patients, many of them young people. (AP Photo/Anmar Khalil)

BAGHDAD (AP) — No beds, medicines running low and hospital wards prone to fire — Iraq’s doctors say they are losing the battle against the coronavirus. And they say that was true even before a devastating blaze killed scores of people in a COVID-19 isolation unit this week.

Infections in Iraq have surged to record highs in a third wave spurred by the more aggressive delta variant, and long-neglected hospitals suffering the effects of decades of war are overwhelmed with severely ill patients, many of them this time young people.

Doctors are going online to plea for donations of medicine and bottled oxygen, and relatives are taking to social media to find hospital beds for their stricken loved ones.

“Every morning, it’s the same chaos repeated, wards overwhelmed with patients,” said Sarmed Ahmed, a doctor at Baghdad’s Al-Kindi Hospital.

Widespread distrust of Iraq’s crumbling health care system only intensified after Monday’s blaze at the Al-Hussein Teaching Hospital in the southern city of Nasiriyah, the country’s second catastrophic fire at a coronavirus ward in less than three months.

Days after the latest fire, the death toll was in dispute, with the Health Ministry putting it at 60, local health officials saying 88, and Iraq’s state news agency reporting 92 dead.

Many blame corruption and mismanagement in the medical system for the disaster, and Iraq’s premier ordered the arrest of key health officials.

Doctors said they fear working in the country’s poorly constructed isolation wards and decried what they called lax safety measures.

“After both infernos, when I’m on call I numb myself because every hospital in Iraq is at high risk of burning down every single moment. So what can I do? I can’t quit my job. I can’t avoid the call,” said Hadeel al-Ashabl, a doctor in Baghdad who works in a new isolation ward similar to the one in Nasiriyah. “Patients are also not willing to be treated inside these hospitals, but it’s also out of their hands.”

Iraq recorded over 9,600 new COVID-19 cases Wednesday in the highest 24-hour total since the pandemic began. Daily case numbers have slowly been rising since May. More than 17,600 people have died of the virus, according to the Health Ministry.

In April, at least 82 people — most of them severely ill virus patients in need of ventilators to breathe — died in a fire at Baghdad’s Ibn al-Khateeb Hospital that broke out when an oxygen tank exploded. Iraq’s health minister resigned over the disaster.

Faulty construction and inadequate safety practices, involving in particular the handling of oxygen cylinders, have been blamed for the two hospital fires. The 70-bed ward at Al-Hussein Hospital was built three months ago using highly flammable interior wall panels, according to hospital workers and civil defense officials.

Inside one major Baghdad emergency room this week, relatives of COVID-19 patients sat on the floor because there were no chairs available.

With hospital space limited, Ahmed calls on Baghdad’s health directorate to advise him where to send patients. “They say, ‘Send five patients to this hospital, another five to this other,’ and so on,” he said.

Hadeel Almainy, a dentist in Baghdad, resorted to Facebook to find a place for her COVID-19-stricken father, pleading: “He can’t breathe, his skin is turning blue. The hospital couldn’t take us.”

In the southern city of Karbala, doctors have begged on social media for donations of remdesivir, an antiviral medication used to treat coronavirus patients.

Al-Shabl said medications and ventilators are running low at her hospital, and 60% of the COVID-19 patients there need the breathing machines.

For the first time since the start of the pandemic, children have come to the hospital with severe virus symptoms, said Alya Yass, a pediatrician at Al-Numan Teaching Hospital in Baghdad.

Doctors blame widespread vaccine hesitancy for the current surge and fear the actual number of infections may be higher than ministry figures. Many Iraqis forgo testing because they don’t trust public hospitals.

Less than 3% of Iraq’s population has been vaccinated, according to a Health Ministry official who was not authorized to talk to the media and spoke on condition of anonymity. The ministry has openly blamed the public for flouting pandemic restrictions.

Health workers said they have expressed their concerns to superiors with little results.

Mohammed Jamal, a former doctor at Al-Sader Teaching Hospital in Basra, said he confronted a ministry inspection committee and asked: Why haven’t the medications been restocked or fire extinguishers replaced? Where is the fire system?

“They didn’t listen. They didn’t see,” he said.

___

Associated Press writer Qassim Abdul-Zahra in Baghdad contributed to this report.

 

Using migration data to fine-tune marketing strategies to rural Indian communities

News from the Journal of Marketing

AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION

Research News

Researchers from National University of Singapore and Stanford University published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that investigates how rural consumers in India shift their expenditures towards branded consumption when they migrate to urban areas.

The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled "The Economic and Social Impacts of Migration on Brand Expenditure: Evidence from Rural India" and is authored by Vishal Narayan and Shreya Kankanhalli.

With Covid-19 disrupting work patterns and increased investment in rural employment, many of India's 450 million internal migrants are returning to their villages. Consumer goods companies view this as an opportunity to grow their presence in rural markets, with migrants serving as unofficial brand ambassadors to home communities. This new study investigates how rural consumers in India shift their expenditures towards branded consumption when they migrate to urban areas.

In many developing economies like India, the majority of rural consumer spending goes to unbranded products that are affordable, albeit less flashy. However, once migrants gain exposure to brands in cities, "they are likely to seek the same brands even when they return to rural areas," Suresh Narayanan, chairman at Nestle India, told The Economic Times.

In line with these insights, the researchers suggest that migration can affect brand expenditures through two major pathways. First, migrants who obtain better economic opportunities might send money or goods in-kind to the sending household. These "economic remittances" can increase the rural families' ability to consume more expensive products that increase their social status in their village.

Second, as migrants become more settled in their new destinations, they can share information on urban lifestyles, aspirations, and behaviors with their families back home. This form of information diffusion, termed "social remittances," can be powerful in overcoming rural households' uncertainty and persuading them towards brands.

The researchers conducted a large-scale field survey of 434 rural families across 30 villages in India and found quantitative evidence supporting both of these pathways. They discovered that economic remittances have a positive and significant impact on household consumption of branded products. This impact is greater for poorer households, for whom brands may be one of the only means of increasing social status.

Moreover, consistent with the idea of social remittances, results show that migration has a significantly greater impact for households that own mobile phones--devices that enable regular communication with the migrant. On the other hand, migration has a much smaller impact for households that own televisions (which substitute for social remittances in exposing households to brands) and those that sent migrants more recently.

A final discovery is that migration has a significantly greater impact on households located in more populous villages where the retail infrastructure is better developed and branded products are available.

These findings have practical implications for brand marketers allocating marketing resources in large developing economies, such as across the 650,000 villages of India.

Conversations with several marketing managers who focus on rural Indian markets confirmed that resource allocation is usually based just on village population and household income. Both of these statistics are available at the village level from census reports. Narayan says that "We demonstrate if managers used migration data for predicting brand expenditure, this would lead to a large improvement in salesforce effort allocation, even when primary data on other household descriptors, such as TV ownership, is available."

The research also applies to the resource allocation problem for door-to-door sales agents in rural communities--a business model that has received attention for increasing female empowerment. Results suggest that when selling to households within a village with similar income levels, these agents can be more successful if they target households who have sent migrants in the distant past and own a TV. Shreya Kankanhalli adds, "To expand on this idea, we create a dashboard that estimates migration effects for 20 identifiable consumer segments in rural India. The dashboard illustrates substantial heterogeneity across households in their propensity to consume brands, implying that the 20 identifiable segments require differing levels and types of sales efforts."

Finally, the research provides insights to stakeholders interested in increasing adoption of branded services in rural areas, such as higher-quality private schools. Managers of rural private schools should consider investing in areas with a high incidence of long-term migration (i.e., migrants who left the village over a year ago) and high levels of remittance receipts. This could mean opening more schools in such areas and/or allocating more teaching and monetary resources to existing schools in such areas.

Meanwhile, for greater inclusion, policymakers could target education subsidies at households not sending migrants or those who have recently sent migrants. Such households are much less likely to send their children to higher-quality private schools.

Migration is a major phenomenon across developing economies. Marketers and policymakers should harness the power of migrants' remittances--both economic and social.

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Full article and author contact information available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429211021992

About the Journal of Marketing

The Journal of Marketing develops and disseminates knowledge about real-world marketing questions useful to scholars, educators, managers, policy makers, consumers, and other societal stakeholders around the world. Published by the American Marketing Association since its founding in 1936, JM has played a significant role in shaping the content and boundaries of the marketing discipline. Christine Moorman (T. Austin Finch, Sr. Professor of Business Administration at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University) serves as the current Editor in Chief.

https://www.ama.org/jm

About the American Marketing Association (AMA)

As the largest chapter-based marketing association in the world, the AMA is trusted by marketing and sales professionals to help them discover what is coming next in the industry. The AMA has a community of local chapters in more than 70 cities and 350 college campuses throughout North America. The AMA is home to award-winning content, PCM® professional certification, premiere academic journals, and industry-leading training events and conferences.

https://www.ama.org

 

Private-public partnership helps to evaluate satellite observations of atmospheric CO2 over oceans

Observations of carbon dioxide (CO2) on board cargo ship and passenger aircraft are upscaled for an expansion of the column-averaged CO2 (XCO2) database uniquely over the ocean. This XCO2 data will be used for improving satellite retrieval algorithms over

NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

Research News

Hiroshi Tanimoto, Director of the Earth System Division at the National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES), Japan, and Astrid Müller together with their international research team, have developed a new method to evaluate satellite observations of XCO2 over open ocean areas, which are currently inaccessible through established validation network sites. In the new approach, a reference CO2 dataset is formulated by combining cargo ship and passenger aircraft observations which were conducted in cooperation with operators of the private sector.

(Background)

After the Paris Agreement entered into force, commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are being expedited. CO2 is the most important anthropogenically produced greenhouse gas. Emissions due to fossil fuel combustion and cement production have caused an accelerated increase of atmospheric CO2 to more than 410 ppm in 2020 since the 1950s (Dlugokencky and Tans, 2021). High quality and high density measurements are needed to estimate changes in anthropogenic and natural emission towards the implementation of the Paris Agreement and achieving the goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emission. Increased research and development activities have been led to monitor CO2 from more than 200 locations on the earth's surface (in 1958, it has been only 2 sites), and by a growing fleet of space-based satellites with global coverage. Among these satellites, the Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT) and the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2) have been launched in 2009 and 2014. The advantage of the space-based observations is their high spatial and temporal coverage, even over inaccessible areas of the globe, albeit at a lower accuracy compared to the in situ measurements. Ocean surfaces are among these difficult to access areas. They cover 70% of the Earth and play the most reliable role in the removal (~2.5 PgC/yr) of the anthropogenic emitted CO2 (~10 PgC/yr) into the atmosphere (Friedlingstein et al., 2019).

Satellite XCO2 data products require validation, which is usually performed against land-based XCO2 data products from the Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON) (Wunch et al., 2011), a network of ground-based Fourier transform infrared spectrometers. However, validation sites observing the atmosphere over the ocean are limited to some coastal and island sites. Therefore, the accuracy of the satellite XCO2 data products over the ocean cannot be fully verified by using TCCON.

Recent studies pointed out that there is apparently a greater bias in the satellite observations over oceans than over land surfaces. TCCON observations of XCO2 at Burgos in the Philippines indicated a bias of satellite XCO2 of -0.8 ppm in the vicinity of the tropical Pacific (Velazco et al., 2017). A bias of -0.7 ppm was also seen by observations of vertical CO2 profiles using aircraft (Kulawik et al., 2019). However, these aircraft campaigns are limited and expensive. To improve satellite data over oceans, there has been no effective method to systematically evaluate ocean biases over long temporal periods and wide spatial areas until now.

In cooperation with the private sector, the National Institute for Environmental Studies has conducted long-term atmospheric observations by cargo ships operating between Japan and North America, Australia, and Southeast Asia, and passenger aircrafts flying from Japan to various parts of the world. Taking advantage of the regular and cost-efficient observations with wide geographical coverage, the new approach is an effective method to evaluate satellite observations over the oceans where no reference data were available. In this study, we applied the method to CO2 in the western Pacific Ocean.

(Method)

In our study, we combine cargo ship (Ship Of Opportunity - SOOP) and passenger aircraft (Comprehensive Observation Network for Trace gases by Airliner - CONTRAIL) observations of CO2, and, with the aid of model calculations, we constructed CO2 profiles from which we obtained the "observation-based column-averaged mixing ratios of CO2" (obs. XCO2) data over the Pacific Ocean. We analyzed the consistency of the obs. XCO2 dataset with satellite estimates from GOSAT (Greenhouse gases observing satellite: NIES v02.75, National Institute for Environmental Studies; ACOS v7.3, Atmospheric CO2 Observation from Space) and OCO-2 (Orbiting Carbon Observatory, v9r).

(Results)

Our analysis revealed that the new dataset accurately captures seasonal and interannual variations of CO2 over the western Pacific Ocean. In the comparison of satellite XCO2 from GOSAT and OCO-2 with the obs. XCO2 dataset, we found a negative bias of about 1 ppm in northern midlatitudes. This bias was substantially reduced for newer satellite products (ACOS v9, OCO-2 v10). The differences between the obs. XCO2 and satellite XCO2 could be attributed to remaining uncertainties in the satellite data, introduced by limitations in the retrieval algorithms due to the lack of validation data over open oceans. With our new approach, these uncertainties can be identified.

(Expectations for the future)

Advances in retrieval algorithms are made rapidly, with almost one new version each year. To evaluate the improvements in these algorithms, our new approach is of great importance. With the help of the private sector, we can rapidly extent the spatial and temporal coverage of reference data as complement to established validation networks. We expect that we can contribute with the new dataset to the further improvements of the satellite data and therefore, contribute to a better understanding of changes in the carbon cycle in response to climate change. In future, our new method of combining cargo ship and passenger aircraft observations will be spatially and temporally extended and applied to other important trace gases. In specific, we plan to use the new dataset for the evaluation GOSAT GW, which is scheduled to be launched in 2023.

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(References)

Dlugokencky, E. and Tans, P.: Trends in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide, NOAA/GML, available at: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ ccgg/trends/, last access: 7 January 2021.

Friedlingstein, P., Jones, M. W., O'Sullivan, M., Andrew, R. M., Hauck, J., Peters, G. P., Peters, W., Pongratz, J., Sitch, S., Le Quéré, C., Bakker, D. C. E., Canadell, J. G., Ciais, P., Jackson, R. B., Anthoni, P., Barbero, L., Bastos, A., Bastrikov, V., Becker, M., Bopp, L., Buitenhuis, E., Chandra, N., Chevallier, F., Chini, L. P., Currie, K. I., Feely, R. A., Gehlen, M., Gilfillan, D., Gkritzalis, T., Goll, D. S., Gruber, N., Gutekunst, S., Harris, I., Haverd, V., Houghton, R. A., Hurtt, G., Ilyina, T., Jain, A. K., Joetzjer, E., Kaplan, J. O., Kato, E., Klein Goldewijk, K., Korsbakken, J. I., Landschützer, P., Lauvset, S. K., Lefèvre,N., Lenton, A., Lienert, S., Lombardozzi, D., Marland, G., McGuire, P. C., Melton, J. R., Metzl, N., Munro, D. R., Nabel, J. E. M. S., Nakaoka, S.-I., Neill, C., Omar, A. M., Ono, T., Peregon, A., Pierrot, D., Poulter, B., Rehder, G., Resplandy, L., Robertson, E., Rödenbeck, C., Séférian, R., Schwinger, J., Smith, N., Tans, P. P., Tian, H., Tilbrook, B., Tubiello, F. N., van der Werf, G. R., Wiltshire, A. J., and Zaehle, S.: Global Carbon Budget 2019, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 11, 1783-1838, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-11- 1783-2019, 2019.

Kulawik, S. S., Crowell, S., Baker, D., Liu, J., McKain, K., Sweeney, C., Biraud, S. C., Wofsy, S., O'Dell, C. W., Wennberg, P. O., Wunch, D., Roehl, C. M., Deutscher, N. M., Kiel, M., Griffith, D. W. T., Velazco, V. A., Notholt, J., Warneke, T., Petri, C., De Mazière, M., Sha, M. K., Sussmann, R., Rettinger, M., Pollard, D. F., Morino, I., Uchino, O., Hase, F., Feist, D. G., Roche, S., Strong, K., Kivi, R., Iraci, L., Shiomi, K., Dubey, M. K., Sepulveda, E., Rodriguez, O. E. G., Té, Y., Jeseck, P., Heikkinen, P., Dlugokencky, E. J., Gunson, M. R., Eldering, A., Crisp, D., Fisher, B., and Osterman, G. B.: Characterization of OCO-2 and ACOS-GOSAT biases and errors for CO2 flux estimates, Atmos. Meas. Tech. Discuss. [preprint], https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-2019-257, 2019.

Velazco, V. A., Morino, I., Uchino, O., Hori, A., Kiel, M., Bukosa, B., Deutscher, N. M., Sakai, T., Nagai, T., Bagtasa, G., Izumi, T., Yoshida, Y., and Griffith, D. W. T.: TCCON Philippines: First measurement results, satellite data and model comparisons in Southeast Asia, Remote Sens., 9, 1-18, https://doi.org/10.3390/rs9121228, 2017.

Wunch, D., Toon, G. C., Blavier, J.-F. L., Washenfelder, R. A., Notholt, J., Connor, B. J., Griffith, D. W. T., Sherlock, V., and Wennberg, P. O.: The Total Carbon Column Observing Network, Philos. T. R. Soc. A, 369, 2087-2112, https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2010.0240, 2011.

 

Nearly 20 percent of intact forest landscapes overlap with extractive industries

Intact Forest Landscapes are critical for conserving biodiversity and fighting climate change

WILDLIFE CONSERVATION SOCIETY

Research News

 

IMAGE: OIL AND GAS EXPLORATION IN ECUADOR view more 

CREDIT: JULIE LARSON MAHER/WCS

Byron Bay (16/7/2021) - A new study from WCS and WWF reveals that nearly 20 percent of tropical Intact Forest Landscapes (IFLs) overlap with concessions for extractive industries such as mining, oil and gas. The total area of overlap is 376,449 square miles (975,000 square kilometers), about the size of Egypt. Mining concessions overlap most with tropical IFLs, at 11.33 percent of the total area, while oil and gas concessions overlap with 7.85 percent of the total area.

IFLs are globally important for conserving biodiversity and fighting climate change. These landscapes represent some of the last places on Earth that still contain species assemblages at near-natural levels of abundance. According to 2013 estimates, 549 million acres of intact tropical forests remain. Only 20 percent of tropical forests can be considered "intact," but those areas store some 40 percent of the above-ground carbon found in all tropical forests. At least 35 percent of intact forests are home to, and protected by, politically and economically marginalized Indigenous Peoples.

Despite intact forests' extraordinary value for biodiversity and humanity, they are declining at an alarming rate, with over 7 percent of their total area lost between 2000 and 2013. While the growth of extractive industries is recognized as a threat to IFLs, the extent of this threat has not been well understood prior to this study.

The authors calculated the spatial overlap of extractive concessions - specifically, mining, and oil and gas - with IFL datasets in three tropical regions: South America, Asia-Pacific, and Central Africa. Of these regions, Central Africa's IFLs had the highest overlap with extractive concessions (26 percent). In addition, they identified the specific stages of extractive projects overlapping with IFLs, and found that most leases are in the exploration stage.

Said Dr. Hedley Grantham, lead author of the study. "Many of these extractive projects are still in the early stages. While this could imply a significant future threat to IFLs, it also means there is an opportunity to mitigate potential impacts before they occur."

The authors recommend that companies incorporate avoidance planning in the design phase of extractive projects, taking into account the most important intact forest areas. Ideally, coordination with governments will allow for landscape-scale planning. The authors encourage governments not to allocate extractives concessions within IFLs where possible. With the appropriate planning, future impacts to these crucial ecosystems can be avoided.

The study is published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change.

WCS is a member of Forests for Life (FFL), a partnership with Re:wild, United Nations Development Programme, World Resources Institute and Rainforest Foundation Norway. Working with national governments, Indigenous Peoples, local communities and others, FFL has two aims - to place ecological integrity at the heart of managing and conserving the world's forests and to halt and reverse declines in integrity across 1 billion hectares of the most intact forests worldwide.

WCS is a proud partner of Trillion Trees, a joint venture between BirdLife International, WCS, and WWF to urgently speed up and scale up the positive power of forests, helping the world protect and restore one trillion trees by 2050.

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WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society)

MISSION: WCS saves wildlife and wild places worldwide through science, conservation action, education, and inspiring people to value nature. To achieve our mission, WCS, based at the Bronx Zoo, harnesses the power of its Global Conservation Program in nearly 60 nations and in all the world's oceans and its five wildlife parks in New York City, visited by 4 million people annually. WCS combines its expertise in the field, zoos, and aquarium to achieve its conservation mission. Visit: newsroom.wcs.org Follow: @WCSNewsroom. For more information: 347-840-1242.

 

Evaluating peers' food choices may improve healthy eating habits among young adolescents

SOCIETY FOR RESEARCH IN CHILD DEVELOPMENT

Research News

According to the World Health Organization, over 340 million children and adolescents (aged 5 to 10 years old) were classified as overweight or obese in 2016, a statistic that has risen from 14% since 1975. Childhood obesity is associated with a wide range of severe health complications and an increased risk of premature onset of illnesses, including diabetes and heart disease. Without intervention, children and young adolescents classified as obese are likely to remain so throughout adolescence and adulthood.

A new study conducted in the United Arab Emirates investigates whether asking early adolescents to evaluate the food choices of peers triggers deliberative thinking that improves their own food selection, even when the peers' food choices are unhealthy. The findings suggest that incorporating evaluations of the healthiness of others' food choices can be a tool to fight unhealthy eating lifestyles. This study is the first to ask early adolescents to evaluate the food choices of "remote peers" (real or fictitious children of the same age who are not physically present). In this instance, the remote peers were fictitious students of the same age identified as coming from another school whose varied (healthy or unhealthy) food choices were shared in writing before the young adolescents participating in the study selected their own food.

The findings were published in a Child Development article, written by researchers at the American University of Sharjah, the University of Granada, Zayed University, University of St. Gallen, New York University Abu Dhabi, Center for Behavioral Institutional Design and the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research.

"We initially hypothesized that early adolescents who evaluate the healthiness of food choices of remote peers will make healthier decisions irrespective of the healthiness of the remote peers' choice," said Ernesto Reuben, lead researcher and professor at the Center for Behavioral Institutional Design at New York University Abu Dhabi. "Our second hypothesis suggested that asking young adolescents to evaluate the healthiness of the choices of remote peers will trigger more deliberative decision-making among 6th graders compared to 5th graders, because cognitive development even in the short span of one year may result in greater reliance on reasoned decisions made more slowly and thoughtfully, rather than intuitive decisions that are made impulsively. Growth in reliance on deliberative decision making with age during early adolescence would mean that being asked to evaluate the food choices of a remote peer could have a higher impact on the healthiness of food choices of the older students compared to the younger ones."

Participants included 467 students (54.5% female) in the 5th and 6th grades recruited from three international primary schools in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. The sample was predominantly of middle to high socioeconomic status.

The week before the experiment, an email was sent to parents of participating students to inform them that they would not need to bring a snack for one of their school breaks on the day of the study. Participants were presented with four different food trays each with five different food items of similar nutritional value evaluated by a nutritionist at the Burjeel Hospital in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Each adolescent was asked to select four food items from the trays. Before making their own food choices, they were informed about the four food items chose by an unknown remote peer attending a different school who was also participating in the experiment.

In each participating school, different classes were randomly assigned to one of four treatments (variables):

• Healthy Peer: the remote peer's food items were all relatively healthy: an apple, a banana, a pear, and water.
• Unhealthy Peer: the remote peer's food items were all relatively unhealthy: gummi bears, a lollipop, chips, and chocolate milk.
• Healthy Peer with Evaluation: after receiving the information about the remote peer's choices but before choosing their own food, participants had to evaluate the remote peer's decisions in terms of healthiness and explain their evaluation. The peer's choices were the same as in Healthy Peer treatment (apple, banana, pear and water).
• Unhealthy Peer with Evaluation: mirrors the Healthy Peer with Evaluation treatment but uses the peer's choices of the Unhealthy Peer treatment (gummi bears, a lollipop, chips and chocolate milk).

Participants were also asked to evaluate the healthiness of the peer's choices as 'very unhealthy,' `unhealthy,' `healthy,' or `very healthy.' Participant's knowledge of the healthiness of the food items was also measured (how they thought parents from their school would rank the different food trays from unhealthiest to healthiest).

The findings indicated that the mere fact of being asked to evaluate the choices of a remote peer led young adolescents to choose significantly healthier food, whether or not the peer's food choice was healthy or unhealthy. In addition, even the small age difference between 5th and 6th graders mattered. Evaluating the peer's choices improved the healthiness of the food choices of 6th graders more than those of 5th graders.

"These findings show that making individuals think more deliberately affects their decision-making--moreover, the stage of their cognitive development matters," said Francisco Lagos, professor of economics at Zayed University and the University of Granada. "The findings also have important public health implications: having a better understanding of how young adolescents develop, evaluate, and subsequently make food choices can help us design effective strategies to improve people's eating habits while they are young."

The authors acknowledge that the adolescents in the study made their decisions without social interaction, whereas food choices are often made by adolescents in social contexts. In addition, study participants were provided popular, familiar healthy food items such as fruit, but not healthy options sometimes considered less attractive, such as green vegetables. Participants were also from relatively affluent and educated families in which adults may be more likely to emphasize the benefits of health eating. The findings are based on specific age cohorts and may not apply to younger adolescents with less capacity for deliberative thinking. Finally, one of the main challenges in improving eating habits is finding effects that last long-term and this study evaluated only short-term effects.

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This research was supported by a grant from the College of Business at Zayed University as part of a project on the Remedies against childhood obesity.

Summarized from Child Development, Early adolescents' food selection after evaluating the healthiness of remote peers' food choices by Cobo-Reyes, R. (American University of Sharjah), Lacomba, J.A. (University of Granada), Lagos, F. (Zayed University and University of Granada), Zenker, C. (University of St. Gallen), Reuben, E. (New York University Abu Dhabi, Center for Behavioral Institutional Design, and the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research). Copyright 2021 The Society for Research in Child Development, Inc. All rights reserved.

 

Teens with secure family relationships "pay it forward" with empathy for friends

SOCIETY FOR RESEARCH IN CHILD DEVELOPMENT

Research News

Teens' ability to empathize -- to understand others' perspectives and emotions, and to care for their wellbeing -- is an important contributor to their relationships, including with friends. Prior research shows that teens who have more secure family relationships report higher levels of empathy for others. But little research examines whether teens with more secure family relationships actually show greater empathy when observed in real-life interactions with peers, or whether their empathic capacities show different patterns of growth over time.

A new study tested whether teens' secure, supportive family relationships at age 14 related to their ability to provide their friends with empathic support across adolescence and into early adulthood. Findings indicate that secure attachment (reflecting on close relationships in an emotionally balanced, coherent, and valuing way) predicts teens' ability to provide empathic support to their close friends. Close friends were also more likely to seek support from teens who had secure family relationships in early adolescence. While having secure family relationships at age 14 predicted greater empathy with peers across adolescence, those teens who did not have secure family relationships in early adolescence showed a pattern of catching up, increasing their empathy towards close friends as they developed. This study is among the first to examine associations of attachment with the development of empathic support using longitudinal methods and observations of empathic support for friends across mid-adolescence.

The findings were published in a Child Development article, written by researchers at the University of Virginia and led by Joseph P. Allen, Hugh P. Kelly professor of psychology.

"Our findings showed that teens who were more secure in their family relationships at age 14 provided greater empathic support to their friends at ages 16, 17 and 18, and they were consistently able to provide that support over time," said Jessica Stern, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia. "Teens who were less secure in their family relationships at age 14 showed lower empathic support for friends in early adolescence, but their empathic abilities grew over time. What's especially interesting is that close friends also sought out more support from securely attached teens."

The study featured a sample of 184 adolescents (86 males, 98 females) recruited from a public middle school (seventh and eighth grades) in a suburban and urban populations from the Southeastern United States. Adolescents in the study were 58% Caucasian, 29% African American, 8% mixed race or ethnic and 5% other identity groups.

In the current study, teens at age 14 responded to an interview about their attachment relationships, unlike most prior studies which used self-report measures of attachment style and empathy. Teens who described their attachment relationships as supportive, who valued those relationships and reflected on them with coherence and emotional balance, were rated as more secure. At ages 16, 17 and 18, teens and their nominated closest friend participated in a video-recorded 6-minute task in which teens helped friends deal with a problem they were facing. Friends' bids for support, as well as teens' ability to provide empathic support, were coded from videos of this task.

The findings suggest a strong association between a teen's having a secure attachment state of mind, or perspective on attachment relationships as supportive, and the development of the capacity to provide empathic support to close friends across a 4-year period of adolescence. Results also suggest that friends' support-seeking develops alongside teens' ability to deliver empathy, with support seeking helping empathy to develop and empathy fostering support-seeking from friends as well.

"Investing in the quality of teens' family relationships early in adolescence may be important for building empathy and positive interactions with peers," said Stern. "Parenting programs, family therapy when needed, and school-based interventions that help young teens feel safe and supported in their relationships with adults--not only parents but teachers, mentors, and extended kin--may equip teens to 'pay it forward' in their empathy and care for others."

The authors acknowledge several limitations. First, the study analyzed support provisions among close friends, but teens may have different motivations for providing support with a range of peers, such as a sense of obligation, the desire to be viewed positively by others (including the researchers). Additionally, it is also important to examine whether adolescent attachment predicts caregiving behavior in other contexts (e.g., with other peers at school, with one's own future children). Future work could take into account other potential sources of friendship stability and change, such as closeness and trust, to provide a more complete picture of friends' support-seeking. Finally, although the sample was reasonably representative of the community from which participants were drawn, the majority of participants were white, and all were from the United States. The authors also note that the present study precludes drawing any causal conclusions. For example, it is possible that teens' ability to be empathetic contributes to their secure attachment, allowing them to take the perspective of others when discussing close relationships, or that the link is bidirectional.

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This research was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the National Institute of Mental Health. Preparation of this manuscript was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health.

Summarized from Child Development, Here for you: Attachment and the growth of empathic support for friends in adolescence by Stern, J., Costello, M., Kansky, J., Fowler, C., and Allen, J. (University of Virginia). Copyright 2021 The Society for Research in Child Development, Inc. All rights reserved.

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New meta-analysis finds cannabis may be linked to development of opioid use disorders BY FAULTY SUSPECT STUDIES

SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF ADDICTION

Research News

 

The idea that cannabis is a 'gateway drug' to more harmful substances such as opioids is controversial, yet has substantially impacted drug policy, education and how we conceptualize substance use. A new systematic review and meta-analysis has found that people who use cannabis are disproportionately more likely to initiate opioid use and engage in problematic patterns of use than people who do not use cannabis. But the quality of the evidence for this finding is low.

One surprising discovery in this meta-analysis, led by researchers at the University of Sydney's Matilda Centre for Research in Mental Health and Substance Use and published by the journal Addiction, was that there aren't many good studies on the gateway drug theory. Despite the frequency with which the topic of gateway drugs is discussed, only six studies were of high enough quality to include. A synthesis of the evidence from those six studies demonstrated that people who use cannabis are more than twice as likely to initiate opioid use and develop problematic patterns of use than people who don't use cannabis.

But the quality of the evidence in those studies is low and must be interpreted with caution. All six studies had a moderate risk of bias and overlooked important confounding variables such as cannabis use frequency and affiliation with cannabis or opioid-using peers. It is unclear whether these unmeasured variables would have had a strong enough impact to explain away the cannabis-opioid use relationship.

It is therefore not possible, on the existing evidence, to state conclusively that there is a causal relationship between cannabis and subsequent opioid use, but it is likely that there is at least a partial causal relationship.

The six studies provided data from the United States, Australia and New Zealand between 1977 and 2017, with a total sample of 102,461 participants.

 

Inadequate sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 variants impedes global response to COVID-19

Better international sequencing efforts are needed to track and respond to new SARS-CoV-2 variants

PLOS

Research News

The lack of sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 variants by the U.S. and other countries is imperiling the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic, argues Dana Crawford of Case Western Reserve University in a new Viewpoint published July 15th in the journal PLOS Genetics.

Surveillance is essential to a successful and rapid response to disease outbreaks, but public health surveillance has traditionally focused on monitoring case numbers, hospitalizations and deaths. Advances in genome sequencing now allow us to track genetic variation in evolving viruses in unprecedented detail. However, despite the availability of sequencing in several countries, the adoption of genomics as a strategy for surveilling the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, has been slow, difficult and inconsistent. Crawford points out that, as of early April 2021, the U.S. ranked 33rd in the world in SARS-CoV-2 sequencing for variant surveillance. She says that historically, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has not prioritized genomic research for public health, and this bias has created a gaping hole in our understanding of the real-time evolution of SARS-CoV-2 and the impact on disease transmission and severity.

Crawford cites insufficient funding, the lack of an effective sample tracking system and strict regulations on sample and data sharing as the causes of the inadequate sequencing efforts. Still, other countries, such as China and the U.K., have successfully overcome these challenges. The CDC recently committed more than $200 million to enhance sequencing, but Crawford points out that this late investment means that the U.S. lacks an organized database of patient information for COVID-19 studies. She cautions that investments in SARS-CoV-2 genomics need to continue and expand as new variants will likely arise due to variability in vaccination rates and adherence to COVID-19 precautions worldwide.

Given that SARS-CoV-2 is a novel zoonotic disease with no prior human infections, Crawford argues that sequencing and analysis are vital to understanding both the trajectory of the outbreak and its evolution. Provisions are also sorely needed to link genetic data to clinical and epidemiological data sources for public health research. Finally, she concludes that ongoing international sequencing efforts are still needed to understand and respond to this continually evolving virus that knows no international boundaries.

"COVID-19 control requires near real-time host-pathogen genomic and public health data to track how SARS-CoV-2 has evolved and how this evolution affects transmission and disease severity," Crawford adds. "US and global sequencing efforts have been too few and too disjointed, underscoring the need to engage with human genomics and integrate its technologies in emerging infectious disease public health responses."

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Peer-reviewed; Opinion piece / editorial

In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS Genetics:

http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1009620

Citation: Crawford DC, Williams SM (2021) Global variation in sequencing impedes SARS-CoV-2 surveillance. PLoS Genet 17(7): e1009620. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1009620

Funding: This publication was made possible by the Clinical and Translational Science Collaborative of Cleveland (to DCC), UL1TR002548 from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) component of the National Institutes of Health and NIH Roadmap for Medical Research (to DCC). Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: I have read the journal's policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interests: SMW is a section editor of PGEN.