Understanding regional climate change is essential for guiding effective climate adaptation policy, study finds

From intensified monsoons and storm tracks to polar precipitation shifts, a new synthesis of regional climate data emphasizes the need for climate adaptation policy based on the latest regional climate science.

Frontiers

 

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Recent models highlight regional climate impacts from the equator to the poles

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Credit: Collins M et al/Frontiers

The effects of climate change are not distant future scenarios or confined to remote parts of the world—they are unfolding now, right in our own backyards. In 2023, extreme weather events impacted communities across every inhabited continent, causing major flooding, droughts, and wildfires.

While worldwide changes, such as increases in global mean temperature, often dominate discussions of mitigation actions, a detailed understanding of the regional impacts of a warming world is crucial for protecting communities from escalating risks. A team of researchers writing in Frontiers in Science synthesized results from multiple new studies to provide a clearer picture of these regional climate change impacts.

"We are constantly advancing our understanding of climate change, particularly its regional aspects, to inform policies aimed at adaptation,” said first author Matthew Collins of the University of Exeter, UK. “While global aspects remain important, humanity will feel the impact of climate change at the regional level. This is where infrastructure planning, extreme event preparedness, and management of public health and food security need to up-to-date climate science."

Regional impacts and rising risks

The study revealed a range of emerging climate change signals at the local level that are likely to occur this century, spanning from the equator to the poles.

In tropical and subtropical regions, dramatic changes in precipitation are expected to significantly alter monsoon intensity, leading to substantial societal impacts. Monsoon systems, which are critical for agriculture, directly affect billions of people. Approximately 60% of the world’s population resides in the northern hemisphere monsoon regions, where the summer monsoon season can deliver up to 80% of the annual rainfall. As aerosol emissions decrease and greenhouse gases rise, monsoons are predicted to become more intense, potentially resulting in floods, landslides, and reduced agricultural yields.

In the mid-latitudes, high-resolution climate models indicate a potential strengthening of storm tracks into northwestern Europe, increasing the risk of extreme weather.

"Increased monsoon precipitation and storm track rainfall variability can lead to droughts in some regions and high winds and flooding in others, resulting in devastating impacts on agriculture, essential infrastructure, and the overall health of communities,” said co-author Vikki Thompson, from the Koninklijk Nederlands Meteorologisch Instituut, the Netherlands.

In polar regions, projections show that a greater fraction of precipitation will fall as rain rather than snow, potentially accelerating ice melt and amplifying sea-level rise. This transition endangers coastal communities worldwide. Moreover, changes at the poles are not confined to those regions. Polar amplification, which refers to the phenomenon in which the poles warm faster than the rest of the planet, can influence weather patterns in the mid-latitudes, potentially altering storm tracks.

Enhanced climate models can improve regional adaptation and resilience

The study calls for a concerted, interdisciplinary effort in the scientific and policy communities to bridge the gaps in climate modeling. Higher-resolution data, integration of machine learning techniques, and new models will improve the simulation of complex climate phenomena at both global and regional levels. According to Eunice Lo, co-author from the University of Bristol, UK, such advancements are vital for informing international climate policies and ensuring that local adaptation measures—such as resilient infrastructure, enhanced early-warning systems, and sustainable agricultural practices—are based on the most reliable and precise data.

“Regional information is essential for preparing for these extreme events and implementing effective, science-led adaptation measures," added co-author Matt Priestley, also from the University of Exeter. "Without investments into advanced climate modeling and monitoring systems, policymakers and local communities are left navigating climate risks with insufficient information, which can lead to inadequate or misdirected efforts."

Climate adaptation and mitigation requires regional assessment of climate hazard risks

Credit

Collins M et al/Frontiers

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Journal

Frontiers in Science

DOI

10.3389/fsci.2024.1340323 

Method of Research

Literature review

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Emerging signals of climate change from the equator to the poles: new insights into a warming world

Article Publication Date

1-Oct-2024

COI Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The reviewer S-PX declared a past co-authorship with the authors AS, PH to the handling editor. The authors MC, DM, P-AM, and VK declared that they were an editorial board member of Frontiers, at the time of submission. This had no impact on the peer review process and the final decision.

 

High costs slow widespread use of heat pumps, study shows

The high cost of installing heat pumps for home heating could slow down people widely adopting the technology and leave government targets missed, research suggests

University of Edinburgh

High costs slow widespread use of heat pumps, study shows

The high cost of installing heat pumps for home heating could slow down people widely adopting the technology and leave government targets missed, research suggests.

There has been a little to no reduction in the average installation cost of the green heating systems over the past decade in the UK, a study shows.

Although projections suggest a reduction of 20 to 25 per cent in installation costs by 2030, this falls significantly short of the targets set by UK policymakers, researchers say.

Domestic heat pumps currently play a marginal role in heating UK homes, experts say. The number of installations is growing, but remains low compared with traditional, fossil fuel-based heating systems.

Researchers say the findings highlight the need for policy aspirations to be based on realistic assessments of likely cost reductions, and to develop incentives that can address the relatively high upfront costs of some low carbon technologies.

As well as decarbonising home heating, advocates for heat pumps say they offer energy security and efficiency benefits, and can offer lower and more stable energy bills.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh and Imperial College London used systematic evidence review techniques to analyse historic and forecast data for the installation costs of domestic heat pumps.

They included the different factors that can affect heat pump cost data such as the type of home, technology design and the wider heating system.

They also assessed equipment and non-equipment costs, and the factors affecting them such as international manufacturing supply chains and local labour markets.

They found there has been no significant reduction in the average installed cost of heat pumps over the past decade in the UK, while modest cost reductions were seen internationally.

However, there are prospects for reduced installed costs in the UK, they said. UK forecasts suggest a reduction in total installed costs by 2030 of around 20-25 per cent, with the anticipated savings higher for non-equipment costs – through more efficient installations, for example – than for equipment costs.

However, while there are prospects for reductions in installation costs, these reductions are unlikely to be on a scale and pace to match UK policy targets, the researchers say.

Dr Mark Winskel, of the University of Edinburgh’s School of Social and Political Science, said: “While there is a growing policy consensus that heat pumps will pay a key role in decarbonising home heating, there are some stubborn economic challenges. Our research suggests the need for realistic expectations about heat pump installed cost reductions, and also, introducing targeted support measures to reflect their competitive running costs and wider benefits.”

The study is published in the Journal Applied Energy (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2024.124014). The research was undertaken as part of the UK Energy Research Centre research programme, funded by the UK Research and Innovation's Energy and Decarbonisation theme.

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Journal

Applied Energy

DOI

10.1016/j.apenergy.2024.124014 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Reducing heat pump installed costs: Reviewing historic trends and assessing future prospects

Article Publication Date

1-Oct-2024

 

Scientists highlight overlooked threats to Arctic coasts amid climate change

It is well documented that the Arctic is warming at a rate 3-4 above the global average, that sea ice is melting, glaciers retreat and permafrost thaws. But what happens when these changes are combined? This is the reality for Arctic coastal ecosystems 

Aarhus University

 

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Scientists study the impact of glacial meltwater on light availability for kelp in Young Sound, NE Greenland. The transport of meltwater from land to the coastal ocean is one of the mechanisms by which climate effects on land are exported to the fjords and contributes to the accumulated impact of climate change on coastal ecosystems.

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Credit: Karl Attard

As climate change rapidly transforms Arctic marine systems, the dramatic image of a polar bear struggling on a melting ice floe has become symbolic of the region’s environmental crisis. But Scientists argue that coastal Arctic ecosystems are undergoing a complementary set of changes to those in the open ocean. These changes are intensified by the interaction of land-based and marine transformations, driving significant impacts on both the environment and local communities.

"An increasing number of ecosystem drivers along the Arctic coasts are having broader implications for both ecological and human systems," the researchers observed. "The consequences of these changes are greater than what can be quantified in the open Arctic Ocean alone." Says Mikael Sejr, professor at the Institute of Ecoscience at Aarhus University.

With these changes come critical knowledge gaps. Filling these gaps is essential to ensuring that the socioecological systems along Arctic coasts can adapt and remain sustainable in the face of ongoing climate shifts.

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Journal

Limnology and Oceanography Letters

DOI

10.1002/lol2.10431 

Method of Research

Meta-analysis

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Multiple climatic drivers increase pace and consequences of ecosystem change in the Arctic Coastal Ocean

 

Climate change, drought, dust, and plankton blooms

PNAS Nexus

 

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Monthly relative anomalies demonstrate the spatial development of chlorophyll-a concentration, a proxy for phytoplankton biomass, during December 2019. Relative anomalies are expressed as the percentage above the monthly climatological mean, relative to the period January 1998–December 2020.

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Credit: Gittings et al

A study links an unusual plankton bloom off the coast of Madagascar to drought in Southern Africa. Climate warming has intensified droughts around the world. When vegetation dies from lack of water, the wind can pick up and carry unprotected soil particles for thousands of kilometers. These dust particles can then act as fertilizer when deposited in seawater. Dionysios Raitsos and colleagues show that dust from drought-stricken Southern Africa caused a bloom of marine phytoplankton off the southeast Madagascar coast from November 2019 through February 2020. The team used standardized anomalies of dust aerosol optical depth from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) and in situ coarse mode aerosol optical depth retrieved by a nearby Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) station to quantify the density of atmospheric dust aerosols over the Madagascar area through time. Dust aerosol optical depth anomalies averaged over the bloom region were the highest ever observed during the 17 years CAMS has been collecting data. This dust cloud coincided with heavy rains, which deposited the iron-rich particles into the sea, creating ideal nutrient conditions for phytoplankton growth. The authors identify multiple potential sources of these iron-rich dust aerosols in Southern Africa, which experienced high air temperature and drought from 2012–2020. According to the authors, as the climate warms, additional phytoplankton blooms caused by the same mechanism are to be expected—and these blooms could take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.    

dust source [VIDEO] | 

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Journal

PNAS Nexus

Article Title

An exceptional phytoplankton bloom in the southeast Madagascar Sea driven by African dust deposition

Article Publication Date

1-Oct-2024

 

Nudges fail to reduce online hate

PNAS Nexus

Seven nudges aiming to reduce hateful speech online all failed—but the nudges unexpectedly succeeded in increasing engagement with harmless and wholesome content. Controlling hate speech is an ongoing challenge for online communities. In a pre-registered experiment, Tatiana Celadin and colleagues compared the effects of seven “nudges,” messages designed to promote prosocial behaviors: reminding posters of descriptive norms, injunctive norms, or personal norms; cooling down negative emotions; stimulating deliberation or empathy; and highlighting reputation. Over 4,000 Americans recruited through the online platform Prolific were asked to interact with a duplicate of Facebook’s newsfeed page. Each participant was shown one of the nudges or, in the control group, no message at all before engaging with the website, which featured 14 posts. The posts were of varying degrees of harmfulness, as measured by study participants who were asked to assess how “abusive” and “hateful” each post was. Unexpectedly, a major effect of most of the nudges was to increase engagement with harmless posts, as compared to controls. Engagement with extremely harmful posts did not significantly differ between the groups receiving nudges and the control group. Also, none of the nudges reduced the spread of harmful content. According to the authors, nudges may be worth pursuing even if nudges only increase engagement with harmless content as an increase of harmless content can dilute and drown out the harmful content. 

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Journal

PNAS Nexus

Article Title

Promoting civil discourse on social media using nudges: A tournament of seven interventions

Article Publication Date

1-Oct-2024

 

Smoke from megafires puts orchard trees at risk

Effects last months, reducing nut crop yields

University of California - Davis

By Amy Quinton | October 2, 2023

Long-term smoke exposure from massive wildfires lowers the energy reserves of orchard trees and can cut their nut production by half, researchers at the University of California, Davis, found. The smoke can affect trees for months after a megafire, depressing their bloom and the next season’s harvest. This finding reveals a new danger from wildfires that could affect plant health in both agricultural and natural environments.

Nature Plants published the study today (Oct. 2).

“A lot of research focuses on the impact of smoke on humans but there is less study on the effects of smoke on plant health,” said lead author Jessica Orozco, a postdoctoral researcher with the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences. “Our study suggests that trees are just as vulnerable as humans.”

Dark skies, less energy for trees

Scientists studied almond, pistachio and walnut trees at 467 orchard sites in California’s Central Valley from 2018 to 2022. In 2020, megafires scorched more than 4.2 million acres in California, filling the skies with smoke and ash. At the time, researchers were studying how trees store energy, in the form of carbohydrates, to cope with heat and drought. But Orozco said the team saw an opportunity to study how smoke affects carbohydrate levels.

“Photosynthesis produces carbohydrates, which are critical elements for tree survival,” said Orozco. “Trees need carbohydrates not just to grow but to store energy for when they’re under stress or when photosynthesis isn’t happening.”

Photosynthesis changes under smoke-filled skies. Smoke particles block some sunlight but also reflect light, creating more diffused light. The diffused light can help trees make more carbohydrates. However, Orozco said the study found that while diffused light increased, the smoke was so thick that it likely didn’t compensate for the loss of direct light.

Lingering effects, less yield

The team found that megafire smoke not only reduced the amount of carbohydrates in trees but also caused losses that continued even after the fires were out. This led to nut yield decreases of 15% to as much as 50% in some orchards. The most active time for wildfires also coincides with the time trees start storing carbohydrates to sustain them through winter dormancy and spring growth.

“We were expecting to see some impact especially in the months when the smoke was really dense, but we weren’t expecting the smoke to have such a lingering effect and result in a significant drop in yield,” Orozco said. 

Orozco said researchers still don’t know what components in megafire smoke caused the decrease in tree carbohydrates. During the 2020 megafires, the smoke reduced light and increased both ozone and particulate matter levels, all of which affect photosynthesis. One or a combination of these factors could have led to the drop in tree carbohydrates.

Additional authors on the study are Professor Maciej A. Zwieniecki and postdoctoral researcher Paula Guzmán-Delgado of the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences.

The Almond Board of California, the California Pistachio Research Board, the California Walnut Board and the California Department of Food and Agriculture supported the research.

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Journal

Nature Plants

DOI

10.1038/s41477-024-01819-4 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Megafire smoke exposure jeopardizes tree carbohydrate reserves and yield

Article Publication Date

2-Oct-2024

 

The rate of climate change threatens to exceed the adaptive capacity of species

University of Helsinki

 

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The study revealed that the Siberian primrose may only be able to adapt to climate change if the warming can be limited in accordance with the goals of the Paris Agreement on climate change.

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Credit: Anniina Mattila.

A recent study from the University of Helsinki focusing on the Arctic Siberian primrose underscores the critical need to curb climate change to allow species time to adapt through evolution.

A research group at the Finnish Museum of Natural History is investigating the adaptive potential of plant species amid a warming climate. Their recent study investigates the Siberian primrose, a plant species that occurs on the coasts of the Bothnian Bay and Arctic Ocean. Climate change is threatening the viability of the species.

“The Siberian primrose is a good example of a species threatened by rapidly advancing climate change. It cannot migrate to more favourable conditions due to geographic constraints, leaving adaptation in its current habitat as its only survival option,” says Adjunct Professor Marko Hyvärinen from the Finnish Museum of Natural History.

The study revealed that the Siberian primrose may only be able to adapt to climate change if the warming can be limited in accordance with the goals of the Paris Agreement on climate change. This requires effective mitigation of climate change. Otherwise, the flowers and other important traits of the Siberian primrose are unlikely to have the time to evolve quickly enough to survive the changing conditions.

Many wild species have limited capacity to adapt to warming climate

“Our research suggests that the evolutionary potential of wild species is seriously limited in the face of rapidly advancing climate change. This means that the future of many species is at stake, unless climate change is effectively curbed,” says Postdoctoral Researcher Anniina Mattila from the Finnish Museum of Natural History.

Particularly in the case of geographically restricted species, such as many specialised plant species surrounded by unsuitable habitats, conservation measures may be necessary to prevent extinction.

The study emphasizes the needs for proactive measures to protect species threatened by climate change. For example, translocations may help species to adapt to new conditions. Knowledge on the adaptive capacity of species from studies such as the one on the Siberian primrose can help in targeting conservation measures and motivates the development of methods to conserve species threated by climate change. However, according to the researchers, the most critical action is to strive to limit climate change, thus allowing species to adapt naturally.

Background:

Importance of the Paris Agreement on species adaptation

The Paris Agreement aims to keep the global average temperature increase well below two degrees Celsius. According to the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the global temperature has already risen by 1.1 degrees since the pre-industrial era, with the Arctic warming up to four times faster. Meeting these objectives is increasingly challenging, but essential for enabling species to adapt.

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Journal

Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences

DOI

10.1098/rspb.2024.1351 

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

The potential for evolutionary rescue in an Arctic seashore plant threatened by climate change

Article Publication Date

2-Oct-2024

Trust in US Supreme Court continues to sink

Asked how much they trust the court to act in their best interest, 1 in 3 Americans say ‘not at all’

Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania

 

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Source: Annenberg Public Policy Center's AIOD Survey in May 2024 and August 2024 and prior Annenberg surveys.

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Credit: Annenberg Public Policy Center

PHILADELPHIA – Driven by political partisanship, public trust in the U.S. Supreme Court has continued a downward slide since the court’s 2022 Dobbs decision overturning the Roe v. Wade ruling that established a constitutional right to abortion, according to a new survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania.

More than half of Americans (56%) now disapprove of the Supreme Court, saying they trust it either “a little” or “not at all” to act in the best interest of “people like you,” according to the nationally representative panel survey conducted in July and August 2024.

Support for the court stands at 44%, with 8% expressing “a great deal” of trust, 11% “a lot” of trust, and 25% “a moderate amount” of trust in the court to act in the best interest of people like you. It is the lowest overall level of trust since APPC began surveying the American public on this issue in 2005, when 75% of the public trusted the court.

Highlights

The new survey, conducted among a nationally representative sample of 1,395 adult U.S. citizens, was fielded July 12-August 12, 2024, following the court’s 2023-24 term, which concluded on July 1 with the court’s ruling in the Capitol insurrection case that Donald Trump has immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts he took as president. The same sample of respondents was previously surveyed in May 2024, during the court term.

In August 2024, 44% overall have trust in the Supreme Court, about the same as 45% in May. But the 40-point spread in trust seen in May between Republicans and Democrats widened significantly to 47 points in August, with 71% of Republicans, 41% of independents, and 24% of Democrats having trust in the court to act in their best interest. Download the topline here.

Earlier APPC surveys found that trust in the court plummeted 22 points after the Dobbs decision, from 68% in 2019 to 46% in 2022. The current survey shows that after a modest rebound, trust has continued to slip, hitting 44% in August 2024. It also finds:

• Growing numbers have no trust in the court: Asked how much, if at all, do you trust the court to act in the best interest of people like you, 1 in 3 people (34%) in August say “not at all,” up from 30% in May. In a 2005 APPC survey, only 7% did “not at all” trust the court, which shows a stunning increase in distrust over the past two decades.
• Partisan split growing even wider: Over the three-month period from May to August, partisan divisions in views of the court increased significantly. In May, the parties were divided, with Republicans seeing the Supreme Court more favorably, trusting it more, vesting greater legitimacy in it, and being less willing to endorse potential reforms to the court than Democrats and independents. After the court term, the gap separating Republicans from both Democrats and independents grew on each of these dimensions.
• Favorability drops in key swing states: Since 2021, APPC has reinterviewed the same set of respondents in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. These data allow us to compare views of the court from 2021, before the court’s Dobbs decision, to today, two years after that landmark ruling. Over that time, we have seen a dramatic decline in the public’s view of the court – mostly from a decrease in support from both Democrats and independents.

“This underscores how Dobbs has fundamentally shifted views of the court,” said University of Pennsylvania political science professor Matthew Levendusky, the Stephen and Mary Baran Chair in the Institutions of Democracy at the Annenberg Public Policy Center and director of the survey. “For many years, the court was held in high esteem by all Americans across partisan lines, but no more – that polarization emerged after Dobbs, and the court’s rulings since then have done little to change these perceptions.”

Partisan differences in attitudes toward the court

For decades, the Supreme Court had been seen as one of the few institutions respected by Republicans and Democrats alike. In a journal article this year, Annenberg Public Policy Center researchers said the court had been primarily regarded as a legal institution, not a political one, strengthened by its “norms, processes, symbols, and independence,” and was therefore afforded greater public trust and legitimacy than other institutions. (See “Has the Supreme Court become just another political branch? Public perceptions of court approval and legitimacy in a post-Dobbs world” in Science Advances.)

A second article this year by APPC researchers found that declining trust in the Supreme Court was mirrored in the federal judiciary, with the percentage of Americans with either “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust and confidence in the judicial branch falling to under 50% in 2022 from 75% in 2000. (See “The withering of public confidence in the courts” in Judicature.)

This year, APPC surveyed a nationally representative sample of adult U.S. citizens during and after the most recent Supreme Court term in, respectively, May and August 2024. These national surveys found that:

• Favorability increased slightly among Republicans but decreased among both independents and Democrats.
• Trust: Republicans placed greater trust in the court, though trust dropped among Democrats and independents.
• Reform: Support for a half-dozen proposed reforms to the U.S. Supreme Court, taken as a group, increased among Democrats and independents, but decreased slightly among Republicans. Overall, a majority of the public shows strong support for several potential reforms to the Supreme Court, including prohibiting justices from participating in cases in which they have personal or financial interests (83% support); creation of a formal ethics code that allows justices to be investigated if they are accused of an ethical violation (75% support); a mandatory retirement age (71%) and term limits (68%). In addition, half of those surveyed (50%) support allowing the public to vote to overturn Supreme Court decisions on controversial issues and a third (32%) support increasing the number of justices on the current nine-member court.
  • For further details on support for potential reforms to the court, see our news release issued in early September, based on the May 2024 findings.

Legitimacy: Institutional support for the court

In addition to the three measures of support described above, the APPC surveys also asked a set of questions which tap into deeper institutional support for the U.S. Supreme Court. Respondents were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the following statements:

1. If the Supreme Court started making a lot of rulings that most Americans disagreed with, it might be better to do away with the Court altogether.
2. The U.S. Supreme Court gets too mixed up in politics.
3. The U.S. Supreme Court ought to be made less independent so that it listens a lot more to what the people want.
4. The right of the Supreme Court to decide certain types of controversial issues should be reduced.
5. Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court who consistently make unpopular decisions should be removed from their position as Justice.

In our analysis, conducted by APPC research analyst Shawn Patterson Jr., we use the average of each panelists’ responses to these questions as a measure of institutional legitimacy. While the effects are smaller than for favorability or trust, here, too, we see that Republicans viewed the court as more legitimate than Democrats and independents in May, and that the gap between the parties grew significantly over the following three months

Evidence from three swing states

Surveys conducted in three swing states – Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – bolster these findings. Panelists were asked about their favorability toward the court on six occasions from November 2021 through August 2024. These results show that:

• Before and after Dobbs, there is a dramatic decline in the public’s view of the court. In 2021, before the decision, the average respondent had a “neither favorable nor unfavorable” view of the court, but post-Dobbs in 2022, that fell 31%, to just more than “somewhat unfavorable” on average and it has remained below pre-Dobbs levels since.
• This decrease in support for the court comes mostly from changes among Democrats and independents. In 2021, the difference between the two parties was relatively small, with little partisan polarization in views of the court. Today the gap in favorability between the parties has more than doubled, a 101% increase.

About the surveys

The most recent findings are based on two ongoing Annenberg Institutions of Democracy (AIOD) panel studies, surveys that interview the same sets of voters over time. One is a nationally representative sample of adult U.S. citizens, while the other is a sample of adult U.S. citizens living in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (the sample in each state is drawn to be representative of adults living in that state). Both sets of respondents were interviewed from May 1-23, 2024, and from July 12-August 12, 2024. The swing state samples have also been interviewed roughly quarterly since May 2020.

Data collection for the national panel was conducted from May 1-23, 2024, among a sample of 1,620 adult U.S. citizens, divided in three subgroups. The margin of sampling error (MOE) for the complete set of weighted data is ± 3.3 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. The panel survey was conducted again July 12-August 12, 2024, among a sample of 1,395 U.S. adult citizens, with a margin of error of ± 3.6 percentage points.

Download the topline and methodology here.

For more information on the sampling of the swing state panel, see the Appendix for the book “Democracy Amid Crises,” available at https://osf.io/487jk/.

The battery of survey questions about court reform was developed under the supervision of Matt Levendusky, director of the AIOD national panel at the Annenberg Public Policy Center. The analysis and graphics were prepared by APPC research analyst Shawn Patterson Jr. The team supervising the survey also includes Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the director of APPC, and Ken Winneg, APPC’s managing director of survey research.

The Annenberg Public Policy Center was established in 1993 to educate the public and policy makers about communication’s role in advancing public understanding of political, science, and health issues at the local, state, and federal levels.

 THAT'S DIALECTICS

Do NFTs create value in games? There are at least three ways to look at it

University of Vaasa

 

image: 

Alesha Serada

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Credit: University of Vaasa

When blockchain is introduced into video gaming, the economy and sometimes the entire design of such games focus on artificial scarcity and ownership of game items. However, this approach overlooks some of the most important aspects of value creation in games, according to Alesha Serada’s research at the University of Vaasa. The value of game items is derived from manifold social relations in gaming communities, in the ways that frequently disregard rarity or price of digital assets.

Alesha Serada's doctoral dissertation demonstrates how the value of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) is constructed in games, using the example of one of the first popular and longest-running blockchain-based games, CryptoKitties. 

The processes of value creation and extraction in games are well familiar to industry practitioners, but they are rarely studied by academic researchers. This continues to be a problem, because consumer awareness is often low, and corporate responsibility in the gaming industry is lacking. Back in 2017, NFTs on blockchain were promised to liberate gamers from corporate greed of major game publishers. As of 2024, this promise is not fulfilled yet.

According to their early adopters, NFTs would ensure property rights in virtual worlds and create new types of value based on unique properties of blockchain technology. After eight years of creative evolution, only very few blockchain-based games have reached a noticeable level of adoption, and even those are critically panned. This indicates the lack of value in such games to their players. 

However, games are one of very few blockchain applications beyond cryptocurrencies that saw at least some level of adoption. So-called ‘crypto games’ made an important contribution to the development of blockchain platforms, as Serada argues in their doctoral dissertation, to be defended on October 4 at the University of Vaasa. 

– I chose CryptoKitties as my primary case for studying value on blockchain, because it was the first of this kind to reach overnight fame, says Serada. – Besides, this is also one of the very few blockchain-based games to have a friendly and vibrant community. Thanks to it, the game managed to survive several ‘crypto winters’ on the cryptocurrency market. Throughout the years, a wealth of quantitative data has been accumulated both on blockchain and off-chain, which I combined with qualitative data from the game community and the game itself.

A holistic model of value creation in games before and after blockchain

Despite the many inefficiencies of blockchain, game designers can learn valuable lessons from blockchain-based games. Based on research, Serada suggests a three-dimensional model that takes into account different types of value: the value as designed by game creators, the subjective value of items projected by an individual player, and the value that is collectively created by the game community. The last type of value is the fundamental and most sustainable way of value creation in games, and yet blockchain-based games are particularly low on it. The dissertation also includes a decision flowchart, which can be used to determine what kind of value, if any, is constructed in a game item represented by an NFT.

Public defence 

The public examination of Master of Sociology Alesha Serada’s doctoral dissertation “Value Creation and Price Negotiation on the Blockchain-Based Marketplace: The Case of CryptoKitties" will be held at the University of Vaasa, in Auditorium Nissi, on Friday October 4, 2023, at noon. It is possible to participate in the defence also online via Zoom, password: 697917

Professor Juho Lindman (University of Gothenburg) will act as an opponent and Professor Tanja Sihvonen as a custos. The defence will be held in English. 

Dissertation

Serada, Alesha (2024) Value Creation and Price Negotiation on the Blockchain-Based Marketplace: The Case of CryptoKitties. Acta Wasaensia 533. Doctoral dissertation. University of Vaasa

Publication PDF https://osuva.uwasa.fi/handle/10024/18000