Quantitative assessment of The Group of Seven's collaboration in sustainable development goals.

Strengthening international collaboration is essential to achieving the United Nations' SDGs. The Group of Seven (G7) is recognized for acting and enhancing cooperation to achieve the SDGs. However, the current understanding of G7's cooperation is rather subjective without quantitative measurements. Here we show a comprehensive and quantitative analysis of G7's cooperation with regards to the economic and environmental SDGs over the period of 2000-2020. The results suggest that G7 countries have all contributed positively to economic indicators thanks to their closely binding relationship. By contrast, significant discrepancies and uncooperative performances in environmental indicators have been revealed. Particularly, Canada and Germany have shown considerable negative synergy contributions to environmental indicators, which might offset the positive contributions brought by France and Italy and lead to an overall negative synergy. Our results highlight the need for further collaboration among G7 to tackle emerging environmental issues, such as climate change and shrinking biodiversity.

Climate Change Impacts on Potato Storage.

In this study, we present a comprehensive literature review of the potential impacts of climate change on potato storage. Potato preservation can help reduce food loss and waste while increasing long-term food security, as potatoes are one of the most important crops worldwide. The review's results suggest climate change can negatively affect potato storage, especially tuber sprouting and diseases in storage chambers. Lower Sielianinov coefficient values (indicating dry and hot conditions) during the vegetative season of potato growing can lead to earlier sprouting. For instance, a decrease of 0.05 in the Sielianinov coefficient during the growing season results in tubers stored at 3 °C sprouting 25 days earlier and tubers stored at 5 °C experiencing a 15-day reduction in dormancy. This is due to the fact that the dry and hot climate conditions during the vegetation period of potato planting tend to shorten potato tubers' natural dormancy, which further leads to earlier sprouting during storage. Furthermore, high Sielianinov coefficient values may lead to worse disease situations. The results also suggest that research about the impacts of climate change on potato storage is very limited at the current stage, and further studies are needed to address the key knowledge gaps identified in this study.

Hedging as an adaptive measure for climate change induced water shortage at the Pong reservoir in the Indus Basin Beas River, India.

This study investigated the adaptive capacity of static and dynamic hedging operating policies to shore up the performance, i.e. reliability and vulnerability, in irrigation water supply of Pong reservoir in India, during climate change. The policies were developed using genetic algorithm optimisation and used to force reservoir simulations for different climate change perturbed inflow series, whence derive the performance. For static hedging, the hedging fraction remains constant throughout the year while for dynamic hedging, this fraction varies monthly or seasonally. Results showed that static hedging was effective at tempering the systems vulnerability from its high of ≥60% to lower than 25%, while maintaining an acceptable volume-based reliability. Further simulations with dynamic hedging provided only modest improvements in these two indices. The significance of this study is its demonstration of the effectiveness of hedging as a climate change adaptation measure by limiting water shortage impacts. It also demonstrates that simple static hedging can match more complex dynamic hedging policies.