Scale up urban agriculture to leverage transformative food systems change, advance social-ecological resilience and improve sustainability.

Scaling up urban agriculture could leverage transformative change, to build and maintain resilient and sustainable urban systems. Current understanding of drivers, processes and pathways for scaling up urban agriculture, however, remains fragmentary and largely siloed in disparate disciplines and sectors. Here we draw on multiple disciplinary domains to present an integrated conceptual framework of urban agriculture and synthesize literature to reveal its social-ecological effects across scales. We demonstrate plausible multi-phase developmental pathways, including dynamics, accelerators and feedback associated with scaling up urban agriculture. Finally, we discuss key considerations for scaling up urban agriculture, including diversity, heterogeneity, connectivity, spatial synergies and trade-offs, nonlinearity, scale and polycentricity. Our framework provides a transdisciplinary roadmap for policy, planning and collaborative engagement to scale up urban agriculture and catalyse transformative change towards more robust urban resilience and sustainability.

Health and Environmental Protective Behavioral Intentions for Reducing Harm from Water Pollutants.

Understanding what motivates people to adopt protective behaviors is important in developing effective risk messaging. Motivations may vary depending on the nature of the risk and whether it poses a personal or impersonal threat. Water pollution creates both personal (human health) and impersonal (environmental) threats, yet few studies have examined people's motivations to protect both personal health and environmental health. Protection motivation theory (PMT) uses four key variables to predict what motivates individuals to protect themselves in relation to a perceived threat. Using data from an online survey (n = 621), we investigated the relationships between PMT variables related to health and environmental protective behavioral intentions related to toxic water pollutants among residents in Oregon, Idaho, and Washington, USA. Among PMT variables, high self-efficacy (belief in one's own capacity to carry out certain behaviors) significantly predicted both health and environmental protective behavioral intentions for water pollutants, while perceived severity of the threat was only significant in the environmental behavioral intentions model. Perceived vulnerability and response efficacy (belief that a specific behavior will effectively mitigate the threat) were significant in both models. Education level, political affiliation, and subjective knowledge of pollutants were significant predictors of environmental protective behavioral intentions, but not health protective behavioral intentions. The results of this study suggest that when communicating environmental risks of water pollution, highlighting self-efficacy in messaging is particularly important to promote protective environmental and personal health behavior.

Reclaiming Hope in Extinction Storytelling.

Critics often take conservationists to task for delivering a constant barrage of bad news without offering a compelling vision of the future. Could recent advances in synthetic biology-an optimistic, forward-looking field with a can-do attitude-let conservationists develop a new vision and generate some better news? Synthetic biology and related gene-editing applications could be used to address threats to species. Genetic interventions might also be used in plants to better protect biodiversity in U.S. rangelands and forests. One possibility has stood out in its ability to capture media attention and the public imagination-recreating extinct species. And perhaps a de-extinction story could counter the seemingly relentless negativity in biodiversity talk. De-extinction proponent Stewart Brand writes that resurrecting species could shift the "conservation story … from negative to positive, from constant whining and guilt-tripping to high fives and new excitement." So, why do many people in conservation oppose the de-extinction narrative? This essay is an inquiry into whether there are intrinsic social reactions to these types of conservation solutions that might offset their potential benefits. If genetic tools are to be applied to address conservation issues in a realistic and responsible way, their broader social-cultural implications deserve far more attention than they have so far received.

The influence of weight-of-evidence strategies on audience perceptions of (un)certainty when media cover contested science.

Controversy in science news accounts attracts audiences and draws attention to important science issues. But sometimes covering multiple sides of a science issue does the audience a disservice. Counterbalancing a truth claim backed by strong scientific support with a poorly backed argument can unnecessarily heighten audience perceptions of uncertainty. At the same time, journalistic norms often constrain reporters to "get both sides of the story" even when there is little debate in the scientific community about which truth claim is most valid. In this study, we look at whether highlighting the way in which experts are arrayed across truth claims-a strategy we label "weight-of-evidence reporting"-can attenuate heightened perceptions of uncertainty that can result from coverage of conflicting claims. The results of our study suggest weight-of-evidence strategies can indeed play a role in reducing some of the uncertainty audiences may perceive when encountering lop-sided truth claims.

The Sumatra-Andaman Earthquake and Tsunami of 2004: the hazards, events, and damage.

The Sumatra-Andaman Earthquake and subsequent Asian Tsunami of 26 December 2004 affected multiple countries in the Indian Ocean and beyond, creating disasters of a scale unprecedented in recorded history. Using the Conceptual Framework and terminology described in the Disaster Health Management: Guidelines for Evaluation and Research in the Utstein Style, the hazard, events, and damage associated with the Earthquake and Tsunami are described. Many gaps in the available information regarding this event are present. Standardized indicators and reporting criteria are necessary for research on future disasters and the development of best practice standards internationally.