Climate change: A pointer to increased small-scale fisher drowning deaths.

Drowning is an overlooked public health concern and drowning risk is dependent on environmental risk factors. The preponderance of drowning deaths occurs in low- and middle-income countries. Small-scale fishers face high occupational risk of drowning. Climate change increases the frequency and intensity of storms, thereby exacerbating fishers' risks and creating a need to examine the contribution of storms to fisher drowning deaths for the development of mitigation strategies. We examined this relationship between weather and fisher drowning deaths in Lake Victoria, which is Africa's largest lake, a site of high fishing pressure, and where climate change is predicted to increase thunderstorms. We conducted a verbal autopsy with people knowledgeable about recent fatal fisher drowning incidents to collect information about the deceased fishers and circumstances surrounding the incidents across 43 landing sites in the Kenyan shore of Lake Victoria. Semi-structured interviews with stakeholders also elucidated community perspectives on drowning risks. Fatal drownings were often attributed to bad weather (41.8%). Other risk factors, such as non-use of life jacket and navigation equipment, co-occurred with bad weather at high rates (69.5% and 67.8%, respectively) to jointly contribute to fatal drowning incidents. Such co-occurrence of risk factors indicates that actions across multiple risk factors can help mitigate the issue. Stakeholder analysis revealed a range of opportunities for improved communication of risks and action to mitigate risks across boat operators and manufacturers, as well as multiple levels of management. Across global small-scale fisheries, limited use of safety equipment and intensive fishing pressure may coincide with increases in extreme weather events, necessitating action to address current and mitigate future drowning risks to small-scale fishers.

Addressing climate change with behavioral science: A global intervention tournament in 63 countries.

Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interventions' effectiveness was small, largely limited to nonclimate skeptics, and differed across outcomes: Beliefs were strengthened mostly by decreasing psychological distance (by 2.3%), policy support by writing a letter to a future-generation member (2.6%), information sharing by negative emotion induction (12.1%), and no intervention increased the more effortful behavior-several interventions even reduced tree planting. Last, the effects of each intervention differed depending on people's initial climate beliefs. These findings suggest that the impact of behavioral climate interventions varies across audiences and target behaviors.