Category Archives: Climate Change

Biodiversity, Climate Change, Planetary Health, Sustainable Development

“Dune” as a Mirror for Our Climate Crisis

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Currently, Dune 2 is playing in our theaters. In a time when the climate crisis is becoming increasingly urgent, the science fiction world of Dune provides insight into the challenges our planet faces. At first glance, Frank Herbert’s story from 1965 about power, betrayal, and survival on the desert planet Arrakis seems to have little in common with our contemporary environmental issues. However, Dune is not just an epic adventure but also a parable about ecology, scarcity, and human interaction with the environment.

The ecological crisis on Arrakis, a planet where water is scarcer than gold, serves as a mirror for our world, where the effects of climate change are becoming more tangible. Arrakis, or Dune, is a battleground for limited resources, with the precious ‘spice’ at stake. This fictional element, essential for space travel, power, and life extension, serves as a metaphor for our own global competition for water, food, and energy. The conflict over the spice in Dune reflects the societal unrest we now see due to climate change and resource scarcity.

On the other hand, Dune shows how important adaptation and resilience are. The indigenous Fremen have masterfully adapted to their environment, with innovative methods for water conservation that are essential for their survival. Their lifestyle illustrates the need for our society to find sustainable solutions for environmental challenges such as water management and agricultural practices, adapted to changing climate conditions.

Dune also calls for a deeper ecological awareness and the necessity of a shared responsibility for the well-being of our planet. The aspirations of some characters to transform Arrakis into a more livable world could be seen as the contemporary movements for climate action. This saga also serves as a warning. It shows the destructive paths humanity can take when power, greed, and shortsightedness dominate our relationship with nature.

Thus, Dune is more than a story about interstellar politics and mystical powers. It was in the 1960s, but now more than ever, an urgent call for reflection on our own world. It invites us to critically reconsider the way we live, consume, and interact with our planet. But it also offers hope by showing that change is possible, that through collaboration, innovation, and respect for our planet, a more sustainable and just future is within reach.

Biodiversity, circular economy, Climate Change, Green Deal, Planetary Health, Sustainable Development

Regenerative Economics for Planetary Health and Thrivability: The European Green Deal

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This policy brief explains the importance of regenerative economic principles for achieving climate neutrality by 2050. Furthermore, we offer a perspective on why mainstream economic systems are unsustainable by design; as they are a legacy of the earlier mechanistic paradigm of the Industrial Age dominated by Newtonian sciences and Darwinian economics. We will explore how a mechanistic approach for societal and human development leads to economic growth models that operate at the cost of vital planetary boundaries and social ceilings; as such, undermining the planetary health conditions on which all life on Earth depends.

Furthermore, we offer a complete overview of the circular economy principles and explain why circularity principles need to expand through regenerative principles in order to achieve the transition to post-carbon economies. We also emphasise the importance of the human factor in sustainability transitions which tends to be undervalued in many of the mainstream circular economy models.

Yet, more fundamentally, we address how the Circular Economy Action Plan needs to go further by addressing the underlying economic growth models and their systemic barriers. To support policymakers and sustainability leaders, this brief includes several Living Systems Protocols from the EARTHwise Constitution for a Planetary Civilization to explore how to transition to regenerative post-carbon economies where growth is decoupled from use of resources. In particular, how to shift economic design as extractive GDP growth machines within a free-market environment to economies as complex living systems embedded within vital planetary and social carrying capacities.

Finally, we conclude with reflections for a larger global vision based on collective so-called thrivability for people, planet and future generations. We invite decision-makers, influencers, thought leaders and think tanks to embrace a planetary health and thrivability perspective, which goes further than including natural capitals and ecosystem services as costs and assets in economic models.

Read the full Policy Brief (Chapter 5) here: Smitsman, A. & Martens, P. (2024). Regenerative Economics for Planetary Health and Thrivability: The European Green Deal. In: Special Collection Policy Briefs: Circular Economy. Studio Europa, Maastricht University.

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Biodiversity, Climate Change, Integrated Assessment

Participatory Design of Urban Green Spaces to Improve Residents’ Health

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Urban green space (UGS) has important impacts on human health, but an integrated participatory approach to UGS design for improved residents’ health has been lacking to date. The aim of our study was to develop and evaluate such a novel approach to address this gap. The approach was developed following guiding principles from the literature and tested with groups of children and elderly as participants in two neighborhoods of Maastricht (The Netherlands) with a low score in economic and health indicators.

The novel aspects of the approach are the inclusion of both positive and negative health effects, the combination of resident self-assessment and model-based assessment of the health effects of UGS designs, and the use of maps to visualize UGS designs and health effects. The participant-generated UGS designs resulted in a considerable (up to fourfold) self-assessed increase in the use of the UGSs for meeting, stress reduction, and leisure-based physical activity as compared to the current situation.

The model-assessed positive and negative health effects of the participant-generated UGS designs were limited: heat stress slightly decreased (by 0.1 °C), active transport slightly increased (by 30 m per day), and the perceived unsafety slightly increased (8%). The effects on unattractive views, air pollution, tick bite risk, and traffic unsafety were negligible.

The major strength of this approach is that it combines active participation of residents in UGS (re)design with assessment of the health effects of these UGS designs. While in other participatory approaches to UGS design, it often remains unclear whether the resulting designs represent an improvement in terms of health, our combination of computer model-based assessment and a participatory process produced clear outcomes regarding the health benefits and use of UGS designs. A major recommendation for improvement is to involve decision makers already in the initial steps of the approach.

Read the full paper here: Oosterbroek, B., de Kraker, J., Akkermans, S., Esser, P., Martens, P. (2024). Participatory Design of Urban Green Spaces to Improve Residents’ Health. Land, 13, 88. https://doi.org/10.3390/land13010088

Animal well-being, Climate Change, indigenous worldview, religion

Sacred Nature: Non-Western Voices about Animals, People, and Climate

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Order here

Ook hier in het Nederlands beschikbaar.

In this book, twelve indigenous and religious leaders from different parts of the world speak about the sacredness of nature. Their age-old wisdom inspires us to think differently about how we deal with everything that lives. The Greenlandic shaman Angakkorsuaq, the American Indian leader Chief Lane Jr., Masai leader Mwarabu, the Buddhist nun Shih, the Islamic poet Ur Rehman Chishti, Orthodox rabbi Slifkin, Mayan priest Sac Coyoy, Hindu prince Jhala, Aztec leader Sanchez, leader of the Canadian Bear Clan Wawatie, Bishop Smeets of Roermond and theologian Valerio of Rochester Cathedral.

See the interviews here.

Climate Change

Policy Integration of Climate Change Adaptation in Central America

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Central American countries have been described as highly exposed to the negative effects of climate change . Policies dedicated to climate change and climate policy integration—mainstreaming—into sectoral policies have been considered key strategies. This article studies the level of integration of climate-change adaptation considerations into three prioritized sectors—general development planning, risk management, and land-use planning—by applying three criteria for policy integration—inclusion, consistency, and weighting. The results show a progressive trend to integrate adaptation into the policy outputs of the three sectors in all countries. Still, the operational level of instruments in some cases fails to fulfill the mandates to mainstream climate adaptation, and consistency is limited. These failures are indicators of lower levels of organizational maturity, which has also been detected in other developing countries and is connected to conflict and tradeoff avoidance behaviors as a filtering strategy to ensure progress at the cost of leaving key issues outside the mainstreaming process.

Read the full paper here: Segura, L.D., Van Zeijl-Rozema, A., Martens, P. (2023). Policy integration of climate change adaptation in Central America: A review for development, land-use planning, and risk management. Latin American Policy,  https://doi.org/10.1111/lamp.12314

Biodiversity, Climate Change, interdisciplinary, Sustainable Development

Teaching and Learning for Sustainability Science in a Rapidly Warming World

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We are in an era of unprecedented ecological and social crises. Human activity has led to the transgression of six of the nine planetary boundaries—including the novel entities boundary, which refers to geological changes that could have large-scale impacts that threaten the integrity of the Earth system processes . This environmental degradation has driven one in five species to extinction.

Further, warming-induced extreme weather events, such as drought, wildfires and flooding, have increased in number and intensity, resulting in widespread suffering and loss of life. Despite political commitments, most governments are failing to take the necessary actions to ensure that the global average temperatures do not surpass 1.5° warming above pre-industrial levels. Alarmingly, global fossil CO2 emissions continued to increase in 2021 and 2022 after dipping by 5.4% in 2020 due to widespread COVID-19 lockdowns. Furthermore, 2015 to 2022 were the eight warmest since the instrumental record began in 1850, despite 3 consecutive years of a cooling La Niña.

The window to control global warming is rapidly closing. On the current trajectory, humankind is set to cause an average temperature rise of 2.8° by the end of the century. In this context, the work of sustainability scientists is becoming increasingly important and challenging. In light of this reality, we argue that we must reconsider the core tenants of transdisciplinary sustainability science. To this end, we propose a model for teaching and learning sustainability as an example of how we might adapt our approach to the pressure of the contemporary context. In a novel way, we model transdisciplinarity. This paper is the product of the Education in a Warming World Research Consortium, supported by Worldwide Universities Network. The consortium comprises university academics with broad expertise in education, sociology, climate change, science communication, health, sustainability, and human behaviour. Our group members share a commitment to transdisciplinary work dedicated to understanding the evolving role of education in this era of rapid climatic change and overlapping socio-ecological crises.

Read the full paper here: Kelly, O., White, P., Butera, F., Illingworth, S., Martens, P., Huynen, M., Bailey, S., Schuitema, G. & Cowman, S. (2023).  A transdisciplinary model for teaching and learning for sustainability science in a rapidly warming world. Sustainability Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-023-01407-z

Biodiversity, Climate Change, Human Health

Health Impacts and Benefits of Urban Green Space 

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Both urbanization and climate change can be expected to aggravate several major human health problems.  An example is mental health: when urbanization increases, incidence rates of psychosis and depression also rise. Other relevant health problems in this respect are those associated with heat stress, air pollution and vector-transmitted infections.

A common characteristic of these urban health problems is that they are significantly affected by urban spatial design. A major element of urban spatial design is urban greenspace (UGS), which is more and more seen as a leverage point to address such urban health challenges.

In this paper, we present a new model, with the aim to address the shortcomings of existing methods and tools, and to meet the needs of urban spatial planners for quantitative, spatially explicit assessment of both the beneficial and detrimental impacts of UGS on human health. The model, named Urban-EcoMATCH (Urban Ecosystems Mapping and Assessment Tool of Costs and Benefits for Health), is applied it to the city of Maastricht (The Netherlands) with a (multi)hotspot analysis for five major urban health issues.: ‘Unattractive views’ (contributing to, e.g., psychological stress), ‘Heat stress’ (contributing to, e.g., heat stroke), ‘Air pollution’ (contributing to, e.g., respiratory diseases), ‘Perceived unsafety’ (contributing to, e.g., psychological stress), and Tick-bite risk’ (contributing to, e.g., Lyme disease).

With the model we were able to identify the hotspots, the areas within a city where urban design-related health problems are the largest. The hotspot analysis did not only provide concrete results for a specific city, but also generated more general insights into which spatial design-related health issues often occur together, and how greening strategies could reduce health burdens and/or enhance health benefits in these hotspots by paying attention to design aspects, especially to UGS type and location.

Read the full paper here: Oosterbroek, B., de Kraker, J., Huynen, M., Martens, P. & Verhoeven, K. (2023). Assessment of green space benefits and burdens for urban health with spatial modeling, Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 86, 128023, doi.org/10.1016/j.ufug.2023.128023.

Climate Change, Human Health, Klimaatverandering

Climate Change can Exaggerate the Effect of Ozone on Cardiovascular Mortality

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Ozone is one of the main air pollutants, and is a global health hazard. Ozone increases the short-term risks of the worldwide total mortality and attribute to about 63 million of mortality around the world. The health effects of ozone are demanding more attention because of its high concentration and the larger influence of climate change in the future.

Ambient ozone pollution becomes critical in China, as in many places in the world. Conclusions on the short-term effects of ozone on cardiovascular mortality have been controversial and limited on cause-specific cardiovascular mortalities and their interactions with season and temperature.

This research aimed to investigate the short-term effects of ozone and the modifications of season and temperature on cardiovascular mortality in China. Higher temperature, particularly extreme heat, rather than warm season, could significantly enhance the adverse effects of ozone on cardiovascular mortality in population under 65 years old. The revealed cardiovascular impacts of ozone below current (national) standards of air quality urges for improved standards and interventions in China, and other places with similar interactions.

Read the full paper here: Gao, P., Wu, Y., He, L., Wang, L., Fu, Y., Chen, J., Zhang, F., Krafft, T. & Martens, P. (2023). Adverse short-term effects of ozone on cardiovascular mortalities modified by season and temperature: a time-series study. Frontiers in Public Health, 11, DOI: doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2023.1182337

Biodiversity, Climate Change, Human Health, indigenous worldview, interdisciplinary, Planetary Health, scientivism, Sustainable Development

Planetary Health: The Recipe for a Sustainable Future

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The concept of Planetary Health is too human-oriented. The emphasis here is mainly on the consequences for our health through global environmental disturbances. Later definitions are already better, with the focus more on the health of our planet and the realization that human health ultimately depends on the health of the planet. For example, climate change and the decrease in biodiversity are unhealthy for the earth and everything that lives on it, including humans. However, the field of Planetary Health is more than that. It is not only the realization that everything is connected, but also the realization that it is not nearly enough to keep the planet ‘as it is’. Positive, regenerative development must take place to keep the planet and everything on it healthy. This also includes a different way of dealing with our earth, a change of perspective. When we respect our planet, we respect life, we respect ourselves. That is also what I believe Planetary Health stands for. Taking sustainability to the next level!

Read, watch or listen to my inaugural address regarding the Chair Planetary Health below:

Climate Change, Sustainable Development

Climate change adaptation in Central America: A review of national policy efforts

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As a tropical developing region, Central America (CA) is one of the areas most vulnerable to current climate variability and future climate change. CA had already been severely affected by changes in climate variability and extreme events and there is a grave potential for an increase in the risk of disasters and therefore multiple losses due to climate change.

CA has a combination of social, economic, and governance factors that exacerbate its exposition to risk. For example, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua are more vulnerable compared to Costa Rica and Panama, where governance, health, and income indicators point to better conditions to face current climate variability and sustain adaptation to climate change.

The authorities of the region have responded to the climate change challenge with a combination of measures integrated into laws, strategies, and plans. Notwithstanding the progress reported in this article, recent developments are hampering and even converting into regressions the advancements in adaptation policy discussed here. Among the destabilizing situations of the economic and political fabric, which sustain progress, we could mention the uprisings and repression in Nicaragua; conflict and threats among the executive and judiciary powers in Guatemala; challenged electoral results, corruption scandals, and social unrest in Honduras; and the increasing fiscal deficit and political deadlock in Costa Rica to advance state reforms. This situation supports the conclusions on corruption as a threat to adaptation efforts, and the vital role of institutions for advancement adaptation.

Read the full paper here: Segura, L.D., Van Zeijl-Rozema, A. & Martens, P. (2022). Climate change adaptation in Central America: A review of the national policy efforts. Latin American Policy, November 2022, https://doi.org/10.1111/lamp.12277