Planetary health digest
Authors: Alastair Brown
Journal: The Lancet Planetary Health (2019)

Plastics are designed to be durable and the ubiquitous and wasteful way they are typically utilised, along with poor waste management practices, is leading to an abundance of plastics in the environment. Large pieces of plastic are an eyesore and represent physical risks to wildlife but as plastics break down into small pieces, microplastics, they are more readily transported and more easily inhaled or ingested. Microplastics have been found very widely spread but the relative role of different transport mechanisms remains unclear. To investigate the role of atmospheric transport in microsplastic distribution into the arctic Melanie Bergmann at the Alfred-Wegener-Institute, Germany, and co-authors analysed snow samples from ice floes from the Fram Strait, near Greenland and, compared them with snow samples from remote (Alpine) and populated (Bremen) sites. They find substantial, but highly variable, concentrations of microplastic particles in Arctic snow. Concentrations were significantly lower than in European snow but higher than expected for such a remote northerly location such that atmospheric transport and deposition seem likely to be important mechanisms for microplastic transport. Research aiming to address complex sustainability challenges often apply “new” modes of research such as post-normal science or transdisciplinarity in order to enhance the practical utility of the knowledge created by incorporating relevant scientific disciplines and non-academic stakeholders. Jens Newig from Leuphana University, Germany and co-authors undertook a comparative analysis of 81 sustainability-oriented research projects, with in-depth analysis of six of these, to investigate the connections between research modes and societal and academic project outcomes. Results are complex but they find a general pattern that early involvement of non-academic partners does tend to enhance the practical societal outcome of research. However, there is often a cost in terms of academic measures of performance such as citations. Encouragingly though this trade-off is not inevitable and well-designed projects with clearly defined disciplinary as well as transdisciplinary phases are able to perform well by both measures. In the face of multiple global social and environmental changes resilience has become an international policy priority. Demonstrating that investments in resilience building are effective and going to the right people and places requires resilience measurement. Approaches tend to be objectively-oriented – using external definitions of resilience measured through observation or external verification, or subjectively oriented – based on people's own judgements of what resilience means to them, and self-evaluation of their own resilience. Lindsey Jones at the Grantham Research Institute, UK, and co-authors investigate if these different approaches yield similar results in northern Uganda. They find that the approaches share similar associations with key socio-economic drivers of resilience but sometimes differ markedly in terms of the contributions of important traits such as coping strategies, education and prior experience. The authors argue that there is a need for resilience evaluators to consider a diversity of knowledge sources and seek greater use of evidence in selecting resilience indicators. Images can be highly influential in shaping peoples' attitudes and preferences, but the role of media imagery in bringing sustainability challenges into everyday cultures and practices is largely neglected. To address this gap Saffron O'Neill, from the University of Exeter, examined over a thousand images associated with articles about climate change in UK and US newspapers between 2001 and 2009, a key period for public climate change engagement. She found a closely consistent visual discourse in UK and US newspapers which changed around 2005. Early framing tended to use distant imagery such as polar landscapes. After 2005, with the rise in climate scepticism, there was a rapid increase in visual coverage, and an increase in use of the contested visual frames with an increase in climate cartoons and protest imagery. Understanding visual use and its influence on peoples' engagement with issues is a vital component of an evidence-based approach to climate and sustainability engagement.