It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, April 09, 2025
World’s largest study reveals the long-term health impacts of flooding
Analysis of over 300 million hospitalizations records in eight countries finds a boost of 26% of all diseases requiring hospitalization
The world’s largest and most comprehensive study of the long-term health impacts of flooding – via analysis of over 300 million hospitalizations records in eight countries prone to flooding events – has found an increased risk of 26 per cent of all diseases serious enough to require hospitalization. This impact on the health of communities lasts up to seven months post event.
The study, led by Monash University researchers, and published in the journal, Nature Water, found that flooding events – which are increasing globally due to climate change – led to increases in hospitalization for cardiovascular diseases (35%), respiratory diseases (30%), infectious diseases (26%), digestive diseases (30%) such as gastroenteritis, mental health disorders (11%), diabetes (61%), cancer (34%), nervous system disorders (34%), and renal diseases (40%).
Led by Professors Yuming Guo and Professor Shanshan Li, the study covered the period from 2010 to 2019, looking at 747 communities from eight countries/territories that had experienced major flood events in that period, including the northeast region of New South Wales in Australia, along the Amazon River and the southern region of Brazil, within the Mekong Basin in Vietnam, and in the south region of Thailand.
An estimated 23 per cent of the global population is exposed to inundation due to serious flooding equivalent to a 1 in 100-year event. According to Professor Guo, there will be “an escalation in the severity, duration and frequency of floods due to the more frequent extreme precipitation events and rising sea levels due to global warming.”
While the health impacts of flooding, such as drowning, electrocution, and hypothermia, are expected, this is the first and most comprehensive study to look at broader impacts on health, “suggesting that the health impact of floods may have been underestimated and will further exacerbate as climate changes,” Professor Guo said.
The countries involved in the study were Australia, Vietnam, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Thailand, New Zealand and Taiwan.
Flood events impact health through the contamination of water supply system, which can elevate the risk of digestive diseases and aid the spread of infectious diseases. Additionally, floods can create environments that are conducive to the growth of fungi, bacteria, viruses, and vectors like mice and insects which can trigger outbreaks of respiratory, digestive, and infectious diseases. Floods may also force massive evacuations, causing displacement. Even when temporary shelters are provided, short in sanitation facilities often result in hygiene issues, raising the likelihood of respiratory, digestive, and infectious diseases. Access and capacity to healthcare services may be impaired after floods, leading to delay in regular medical interventions, which include dialysis for renal diseases, chemotherapy and radiotherapy for cancer, and medication regimens for cardiovascular diseases, respiratory diseases, infectious diseases, digestive diseases, mental disorders, diabetes, nervous system disorders, and renal diseases. And long-term psychological stress (e.g., from property damage and financial losses) can worsen or induce adverse health outcomes by compromising the immune system, disrupting sleep, leading to substance abuse, and diminishing self-care.
Hospitalization Risks Associated with Floods in Multi-Country Study
Article Publication Date
8-Apr-2025
Study highlights role of social workers in addressing marginalized communities bearing brunt of climate disasters
Researcher calculated carbon footprints for extremely impoverished community, detailed how they absorb climate crises, argues for role of social work in addressing injustice
LAWRENCE — In one of the most impoverished areas of Seoul, South Korea, residents live in precarious conditions: tiny micro-units often without bathrooms, kitchens, heating or cooling. The residents contribute the least among society to climate change yet suffer disproportionately due to historical and systemic inequalities. A new study from the University of Kansas highlights the inequalities, calling for social workers to play a critical role in advocating for and including marginalized communities in addressing climate change and injustice.
“The community members in jjokbang-chon are subjected to the worst of climate change while contributing the least to its causes. This pattern is not unique to jjokbang-chon — it reflects a broader global injustice,” Kang said. “Higher-income countries and cities drive emissions through their lifestyles and consumption, yet it is poorer countries and marginalized communities that bear the brunt of climate disasters. This disparity, known as the carbon divide, highlights how the wealthiest 10% of the global population are responsible for nearly 50% of all emissions, while those with the smallest carbon footprints suffer the most.”
Kang and co-author Chris Weatherly of the University of Georgia estimated the carbon footprint of residents through surveys and interviews, assessing their energy consumption, transportation use and household expenditures.
The findings revealed that jjokbang-chon residents emit just under 4 metric tons of carbon per year — less than one-third of the average South Korean citizen, despite South Korea having one of the highest per capita emissions globally. This stark contrast underscores the deep carbon emission inequality and broader climate injustice within the country.
The low emissions of jjokbang-chon residents are directly tied to their lifestyle shaped by poverty. The findings revealed that they rarely leave their neighborhood, not by choice but due to structural barriers, resulting in minimal transportation use. They experience severe energy deprivation, exacerbated by a built environment that lacks adequate heating and cooling. Additionally, exploitative landlord practices further restrict their access to essential resources, deepening their vulnerability to climate-related hardships.
While jjokbang-chon residents emit significantly less carbon than the national average in South Korea, their emissions still exceed those of billions in the Global South. This underscores the complex challenge of reducing emissions while ensuring social equity, according to the researchers.
In the study, published in the journal Ethics and Social Welfare, Kang and Weatherly highlight the dilemmas social workers may face in advancing climate solutions that both reduce overall emissions and promote justice for marginalized communities. They emphasize the vital role of social workers as facilitators and advocates, stressing the importance of collaboration and community empowerment in creating just and equitable responses to climate change.
For example, a government-led plan to redevelop jjokbang-chon neighborhoods has been actively resisted by private developers for years. Social workers play a crucial role in advocating for those without political power, particularly in the fight for housing rights. While development and construction contribute to carbon emissions, jjokbang-chon residents still need strong advocacy within the broader framework of climate justice. One approach could be to push not just for redevelopment, but for carbon-neutral public housing, the researchers wrote. Social workers are essential in driving society toward a future that reduces dependence on a carbon-based economy and promotes greater equity.
The study’s results highlight that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to addressing climate injustice and build on Kang’s previous work, which emphasizes the importance of a community-driven approach in addressing climate vulnerability.
Climate Justice and Carbon Emission Inequality: Social Work’s Dilemma in Marginalized Communities
The Frontiers of Knowledge Award goes to Philip Kitcher, a “humanistic intellectual” whose philosophical output has addressed a broad spectrum of the core questions of our time
The John Dewey Professor at Columbia University has authored landmark publications on multiple topics ranging from the philosophy of biology and the origins of ethics to the role of science in democratic societies.
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Humanities category has gone in this seventeenth edition to the Anglo-American philosopher Philip Kitcher, described by the committee as a “humanistic intellectual” whose trailblazing work addresses a broad spectrum of the core questions of our time.
The John Dewey Professor Emeritus at Columbia University has made fundamental contributions of wide-ranging impact in the philosophy of science, particularly the philosophy of biology, which “demonstrate the relevance of the life sciences to the humanities, and vice versa,” in the words of the award citation.
In an academic career spanning over four decades, Professor Kitcher has authored landmark publications on multiple topics ranging from the philosophy of mathematics and the origins of ethics to the role of science in democratic societies, the vital role of education in turning children into citizens and the global environmental crisis. On this last score, he has written a series of Socratic dialogues meditating on the issue of climate change, which he depicts as the greatest challenge confronting humanity.
His intellectual curiosity, the committee points out, has also led him to unpack the ethical and philosophical teachings to be found in the works of literary greats like James Joyce and Thomas Mann or in the music of Richard Wagner.
“His book The Advancement of Science (1993), which came out just over 30 years ago, is a pioneering work that defends the importance of rationality in science. It’s also the forerunner to another of his most celebrated titles, Science, Truth, and Democracy (2001), where Professor Kitcher explores the role of science in a democratic society, and articulates a key philosophical concept, that of ‘science in the service of the common good’. That is, the idea that scientific activity is not just a matter for the researchers who do it, and far less the economic interests of the institutions who put up the funding. Rather, the research agenda should emerge from a process of rational, public deliberation among informed citizens in pursuit of a common benefit. Scientific progress should be governed by the principles of social justice and equity, as well as ethical responsibility,” explains committee secretary Atocha Aliseda, Professor of Philosophy in the Institute for Philosophical Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
The awardee himself defines philosophy as a synthetic endeavor whose goal is “to incorporate all sorts of knowledge from scientific and humanistic disciplines, figuring out how disparate things that seem not to fit together can be welded into a coherent whole” that helps us “progress morally and improve the world we live in”
From mathematics to the philosophy of science
Philip Kitcher’s road to philosophy began at the University of Cambridge. Initially a math undergraduate, he was convinced by one of his professors to move sideways into history and philosophy of science. Similarly, his early research during his doctoral studies at Princeton University was on the history and philosophy of mathematics, but the questions posed by his students there sparked an interest in biology. He spent a year learning about the subject at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, and would later take issue with the theory of sociobiology which, he contended, was based on the social behavior of insects like ants, with the conclusions then extrapolated to human beings. For the awardee, “with humans, you have to deal with far more complex environments, and take account of the cultural forces that help shape our evolution.”
Ethics as an amplification of the biological capacity to help others
Kitcher has also reflected on what biology can teach us about human ethics, summing it up thus: “The central feature of our ethical life is the capacity to see that a fellow creature needs something and help them to achieve it.” The primatologist Frans de Waal (1948-2024), who taught psychology at Emory University, Atlanta, showed that chimpanzees and bonobos can detect when one of their own is trying to complete a task, and will take quite complex steps to help them out. In his book The Ethical Project (2011), the awardee contends that humans too have always possessed this responsiveness, though in our ancestors’ times it was fairly limited. “I see the introduction of ethical life as a way of amplifying this responsiveness, enabling us to be more cooperative and thereby to live in increasingly large societies, from groups of 40 people about 20,000 to 30,000 years ago to the first cities about 8,000 to 10,000 years ago. Such amplification requires our coming to terms with one another, understanding who we are, and trying to find solutions to the problems that divide us. So it’s negotiation, cooperation and mutual understanding that lie at the core of ethics.”
Kitcher proposes three examples of society’s moral progress, when public debate is shaped by this mutual understanding, expanding our sympathies to people we once saw as limited or even not entirely human: the abolition of slavery, the expansion of opportunities for women, and the recognition of same-sex romantic love. “These shifts came about when a few people here and there started to understand the lives of others in a way they hadn’t before. And that became more and more broadcast until it eventually led to changes in social norms and even laws in ways that count as moral and social progress,” he explains. “Now, I think the difficulty for ethical life is understanding how to do this in complicated situations, where there are many people who have demands and needs that are not being met.”
From the Human Genome Project to the role of science in democratic societies
In the mid 1990s, Kitcher examined the ethical implications of the Human Genome Project in a report for the U.S. Library of Congress, which became the book The Lives to Come (1996). In the course of talking to congressional staff, he realized that the reasons they thought the project was important were completely different from the reasons that were motivating the scientific community. Rather than curing, or at least diagnosing all kinds of disease, what the politicians wanted was to gain a competitive advantage over Japan, then rivaling America in technological prowess.
This disconnect led the philosopher to reflect on how science does and should relate to the societies that fund it and in which that science will be applied. The result was Science, Truth, and Democracy, a book publication in which, he says, “without underrating the value of basic research, which I consider immensely important, I argue that the reason it is so important is because, eventually, it yields understandings that enable people to do things that improve human lives.” For in the end, he reflects, “science is all about the benefit it can bring to humanity.”
These reflections led Kitcher to inquire further into science’s role in society, which led him in turn to a vision of democracy “that requires far more than simply people voting from time to time on different issues or even constitutions. What democracy really requires is people working together to try to understand what problems need to be solved and how the knowledge that we are gaining from scientific research can be adapted to solve those problems.” In this respect, the philosopher sees the progress of the sciences and the progress of our ethical and political systems as forming what is potentially a “virtuous spiral,” such that as we learn more about the world, we make better ethical decisions, and as we make better ethical decisions, we learn more about which scientific programs or projects are most important.
Educate children by giving them the resources to become citizens
This ability to connect objects of analysis so present in Kitcher’s thought also emerges in his work on education, another of his passions. It is for this reason that he considers The Main Enterprise of the World: Rethinking Education (2021) to be among the most important books he has written. Here too he talks about cooperation as a fundamental driver of social progress, setting out three main ways in which childhood education can contribute to this goal: allowing children to do productive things that help them maintain themselves (in the sense of earning a living rather than contributing to the national wealth); making them into citizens who can cooperate with other people in the building of a society; and, finally, giving them the opportunity to understand what matters to them and choose the shapes of their own lives.
“I’m profoundly indebted to John Stuart Mill, who said that ‘the only freedom which deserves the name is that of choosing and pursuing our own good in our own way’. By that, I think he meant throwing off the thought that people’s lives are prescribed by the fact that they belong to a particular race, caste, class or sex. That people’s lives should be shaped by themselves. And to do that, you need to give them the resources for understanding themselves and understanding their options well enough so that they can find their own path and pursue it with some chances of success. So my education book is really a book about these three aims and how you might put them all together.”
The committee also made reference to Professor Kitcher’s work on climate change. In his talks and writing on the subject, he reviews what he sees as the main problems of the climate challenge and provides verifiable data on its main magnitudes, to conclude once more that without in-depth cooperation, in this case between countries, the challenge will not be easily solved. “Climate change is a social and ethical problem,” he affirms, while admitting that he is not the person to take this message into the political world. “What I am is a diagnostician who can lay out what’s happening in a clear and convincing way. Then maybe others who are much more talented at political and social work can take it and use it to build something better.”
Philosophy as a ‘superdiscipline’ integrating knowledge from every field
For Kitcher, the humanities are “immensely important,” because “they are crucial to our understanding of ourselves. We don’t want to settle for oversimplified cartoonish descriptions based on the idea that science tells us everything we need to know about ourselves. The humanistic tradition in literature, in history, in philosophy, in certain kinds of anthropology is tremendously important to our understanding of what human beings are and what they can be.”
Within the humanities, though, the awardee accords philosophy a special place: “It’s a kind of superdiscipline that tries to take the sciences, what we learn about politics, religion or history, the insights literature gives us… and tries to make them all fit, so we can figure out how it all hangs together. That is philosophy’s task.”
The role of literature in our ethical understanding of others
The breadth of Kitcher’s scholarship that the committee remarks on extends to his leisure time pursuits. An amateur musician and book lover, he has unpacked the philosophical ideas contained in such masterworks as Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung tetralogy and James Joyce’s Ulysses – for which he is now writing a detailed reader’s guide – and Finnegans Wake.
In doing so, he says, he realized “how much my personal interests relate to my ethical views and my general social and political philosophy. There are themes, at least in my takes on the literary and musical works that I write about, that reflect the kinds of approaches I take to ethical and political life. And indeed, I have another project which is underway but far from finished, which is literature and the moral imagination, the way that literature plays a role in sparking our understanding of other people.”
The evaluation support panel charged with nominee pre-assessment was coordinated by Elena Cartea, Deputy Vice-President of Scientific-Technical Areas at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and Lorenzo Delgado Gómez-Escalonilla, Scientific Researcher at the Institute of History (IH, CSIC). Its members were: Jon Arrizabalaga Valbuena, Research Professor at the Mila i Fontanals Institution (IMF, CSIC); Esther Hernández Hernández, Scientific Researcher at the Institute of Language, Literature and Anthropology (ILLA, CSIC); Daniel Riaño Rufilanchas, Tenured Scientist at the Institute of Languages and Cultures of the Mediterranean and the Near East (ILC, CSIC); and Concepción Roldán Panadero, Research Professor at the Institute of Philosophy (IFS, CSIC).
Heavy methane emissions from Swedish lakes baffle researchers
Multimedia Release 8-Apr-2025 Chalmers University of Technology
Locals at Lake Siljan in northern Sweden have told of persistent winter ice holes that often occur in the same place year after year. Now, researchers from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have examined the area with a completely new measurement method and discovered unexpectedly strong methane emissions from several places on the lakes in the area – which is the cause of the holes in the ice.
As the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, many companies transitioned to remote and hybrid work models, but many firms have rescinded or revised these policies, requiring employees to return to the office at least part-time. In a new study, researchers examined the effect of physical work environments on organizational processes and outcomes.
Their analysis identified two major themes: 1) task accomplishment, or how physical work environments influence physical and mental health, motivation and attitudes, and work processes, and 2) resource position, or how these environments affect firms’ tangible resource position, ability to attract and retain human resources, and shaping of intangible assets such as organizational culture and reputation.
The study was conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, London Business School, and Singapore Management University. It is published in the Journal of Management.
“The significance of physical work environments has gained heightened attention in managerial and academic circles, especially following the rise and revision of remote and hybrid work models spurred by the pandemic,” explains Sunkee Lee, Associate Professor of Organizational Theory and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business, who coauthored the study. “This renewed interest calls for a comprehensive assessment of their organizational implications.”
Research on physical work environments—the dedicated tangible spaces where employees carry out professional tasks—has accumulated across various disciplines, levels of analyses, contexts, and dimensions. But the work has largely been fragmented within each domain and has, at times, revealed diverging and contradictory effects of the same aspects of the environments. This has limited a comprehensive and balanced understanding of how these environments influence firms’ operations and performance.
In this study, researchers analyzed and synthesized decades of research across various disciplines using a conceptual framework that defines physical work environments along three key dimensions: ambience, spatial configuration, and aesthetics. They analyzed these dimensions for their effects on both internal stakeholders, such as employees, and external stakeholders, including clients, suppliers, and investors.
Workplace ambience, spatial configuration, and aesthetics affect outcomes related to task accomplishment, including physical and mental health, motivation and attitudes, and work processes, the analysis concluded. While features that produce excessive stimuli can harm employees’ health and motivation, appropriate designs can enhance these factors. Similarly, spatial attributes that foster encounters and access can either facilitate or hinder work, depending on the task and the organizational context. Therefore, consciously aligning the features of the physical environment with intended outcomes helps achieve desired results, the authors suggest.
In addition, physical work environments can shape a firm’s resource position, including tangible resource conservation/expenditure, human resource acquisition/loss, and intangible resource conferment/revocation. For example, open-plan layouts can conserve resources through efficient use of space, while costly or poorly designed features can boost operational and maintenance costs, undermining companies’ tangible resources.
Firms can also communicate their values and strategies through physical work environments, whether intentionally or not. Effective signaling can attract talent by resolving information asymmetry, while mismatches between workspace design and employees’ perceived status may lead to negative outcomes, such as loss of human capital. Symbolic features can further influence intangible resources like legitimacy and credibility, which are essential for a firm’s competitive advantage.
“In my view, physical work environments remain relevant; it is how they are used that makes the difference,” concludes Professor Lee.
Physical Work Environments: An Integrative Review and Agenda for Future Research
Reducing cattle ranching is not enough to restore degraded soils in the Caatinga
Study carried out in Brazil’s semi-arid biome found that removing animals did not lead to significant improvements, even after three years of spontaneous soil recovery. Researchers suggest measures such as green manure and strategic tree planting.
Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo
The Caatinga is the only biome found exclusively in Brazil and is home to the largest contiguous area of seasonally dry tropical forest in the world. However, anthropogenic activities such as cattle ranching, agriculture and firewood exploitation have caused large-scale environmental degradation processes that, together with climate change, could even lead to desertification.
A study of cattle ranches in the semi-arid region of the state of Pernambuco found that simply stopping grazing did not restore soil health. The researchers recommend complementary initiatives such as green manure and strategic tree planting, which have shown promise in other tropical biomes. This active management can accelerate the restoration of multiple soil functions, promoting the contribution of carbon and nitrogen to the system, as well as improvements in nutrient cycling and biodiversity.
This long-term research is being conducted in Pernambuco to assess the long-term effects of overgrazing (too many animals in the pasture), a typical condition in the region, and the effects of isolating plots to exclude these animals. The research is part of the Perennial Network of the National Observatory of Water and Carbon Dynamics in the Caatinga Biome (CBC), a National Institute of Science and Technology (INCT) co-funded by the Brazilian National Council for Technological and Scientific Development (CNPq). The results were published in the Journal of Environmental Management.
“We compared the soils of the three most common cover types in the region: preserved dense forests, open forests regenerating after deforestation and prolonged grazing, and pastures with a history of decades of overgrazing. The study showed that overgrazing compacts the soil and reduces the availability of nitrogen, carbon, microbial biomass and glomalin proteins, affecting essential physical, chemical and biological functions. We also found that removing animals from these areas [which were fenced off to prevent grazing] did not bring significant improvements, even after three years of spontaneous soil recovery,” says Wanderlei Bieluczyk, a researcher at the Center for Nuclear Energy in Agriculture at the University of São Paulo (CENA-USP) and first author of the article.
He says that on a regional scale, the transition from dense forest to degraded pasture has resulted in a loss of 14.7 tons of carbon per hectare. Removed from the soil at depths of up to 20 centimeters, this carbon ends up being oxidized and released into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming. In the same transition, the study found an 18% regional decline in a holistic soil health index. “We developed a soil health index based on multiple edaphic functions [i.e. those belonging to or related to the soil], integrating physical, chemical and biological indicators. In terms of biological indicators, such as microbial biomass carbon, beta-glucosidase and glomalin, the conversion from forest to pasture reduced their values by more than 45%.”
It is worth remembering that “soil health” is a concept that refers to the ability of soil to support biodiversity, including microorganisms, plants and animals, while maintaining essential functions such as water absorption and retention, resistance to erosion, and nutrient cycling, among others that were assessed in the study. This concept applies to a wide range of environments, from protected ecosystems to productive agricultural lands.
“It became clear that overgrazing causes severe degradation of soil health in the Caatinga, and that simply excluding animals is not enough to restore soil functions within a few years of isolating the area. The recovery of areas degraded by inappropriate pasture management, especially due to excessive grazing pressure, is a challenging process and probably requires additional practices, such as the use of green manure and strategic tree planting, to accelerate the ecological recovery of the soil,” Bieluczyk emphasizes.
Green manuring is the practice of sowing or planting plants known as green manures to improve soil fertility and structure. This technique has been used successfully in forest restoration in the Atlantic Rainforest biome, for example. The plants, which are usually composed of legumes or grasses, contribute biomass to nitrogen fixation, nutrient recycling and soil protection. Once they have reached a certain stage of development, they can be cut down and incorporated into the soil or allowed to senesce naturally in the shade of regenerating tree canopies. In this way, the soil is protected from erosion, retains more moisture, and receives a gradual supply of nutrients as the biomass decomposes.
Strategic tree planting involves planting fast-growing trees capable of forming a dense canopy in a short period of time. In this way, the soil is protected from excessive sunlight and a “forest environment” is gradually created under the canopy, favoring the germination and development of various regenerative species in this now more favorable environment.
All of this has to be considered in light of the great specificity of the Caatinga biome, as Ana Dolores Santiago de Freitas, a professor in the Agronomy and Soil Science Graduate Programs at the Federal Rural University of Pernambuco (UFRPE) and coordinator of the project in question, explains. “The Caatinga is a different biome from the others in Brazil because of its semi-arid climate, which is only found in the Northeast. Here, the scarcity and irregularity of rainfall are combined with the great loss of moisture in the soil and plants due to the high temperatures throughout the year as a result of its proximity to the equator. The long coexistence with this climate has led to various plant adaptation processes. Most trees and shrubs shed their leaves in the dry season; because they are short-lived, the leaves are thin, with little biomass, and they form quickly when the rains come; there are many short-lived herbaceous plants that are only present in the rainy season, and many succulent plants, such as bromeliads, or thorny and leafless ones, such as cacti,” says Freitas.
The researcher adds that the little variation in temperature and light and the availability of water regulate the vegetation, creating a mosaic of situations. “The edges of the biome, with the Atlantic Rainforest to the east and the Cerrado [Brazilian savannah-like biome] to the west and south, get a little more rain, as do the higher areas in the semi-arid core. Throughout the region, topography has an influence, with valleys receiving water runoff from the hillsides. Added to this is the greatest variability of soil types in Brazil, from deep to shallow and from slightly to very fertile, with contrasting types in close proximity. All this environmental variability has resulted in a very diverse flora, with thousands of species, one of the richest among the world’s semi-arid regions,” she emphasizes.
According to Freitas, the Caatinga is also in a very high state of ecological degradation due to decades of inappropriate and unsustainable use of native vegetation as fodder. Bieluczyk describes the step-by-step process of degradation: “It all starts with the removal of native vegetation, logging and burning. Then comes grazing and soil compaction from excessive trampling by cattle. Compacted soil makes it difficult for water to infiltrate and for roots to grow, resulting in many patches of exposed soil. And of all this leads to a loss of nutrients and soil health.”
The researcher emphasizes the need for public policies aimed at the recovery of the Caatinga and the sustainable management of agricultural activities that guarantee the conservation of the biome’s ecosystem services.
The study was conducted in areas located in three municipalities in the semi-arid region of Pernambuco: Araripina, Sertânia and São Bento do Una. Soil and vegetation samples were taken to assess the impact of degradation and the first signs of recovery. The research is the result of a partnership between USP, UFRPE, the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), the National Semi-Arid Institute (INSA) and the Federal University of the Agreste of Pernambuco (UFAPE). It was supported by FAPESP through four projects (2014/50279-4, 2020/15230-5, 2022/07490-2 and 2023/18333-8).
About FAPESP
The São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) is a public institution with the mission of supporting scientific research in all fields of knowledge by awarding scholarships, fellowships and grants to investigators linked with higher education and research institutions in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. FAPESP is aware that the very best research can only be done by working with the best researchers internationally. Therefore, it has established partnerships with funding agencies, higher education, private companies, and research organizations in other countries known for the quality of their research and has been encouraging scientists funded by its grants to further develop their international collaboration.
