Browsing by Author "Spector, June T"

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    Consistent cooling benefits of silvopasture in the tropics.
    (Nat Commun, 2022-02-04) Zeppetello, Lucas R Vargas; Cook-Patton, Susan C; Parsons, Luke A; Wolff, Nicholas H; Kroeger, Timm; Battisti, David S; Bettles, Joseph; Spector, June T; Balakumar, Arjun; Masuda, Yuta J
    Agroforestry systems have the potential to sequester carbon and offer numerous benefits to rural communities, but their capacity to offer valuable cooling services has not been quantified on continental scales. Here, we find that trees in pasturelands ("silvopasture") across Latin America and Africa can offer substantial cooling benefits. These cooling benefits increase linearly by -0.32 °C to -2.4 °C per 10 metric tons of woody carbon per hectare, and importantly do not depend on the spatial extent of the silvopasture systems. Thus, even smallholders can reap important cooling services from intensifying their silvopasture practices. We then map where realistic (but ambitious) silvopasture expansion could counteract a substantial fraction of the local projected warming in 2050 due to climate change. Our findings indicate where and to what extent silvopasture systems can counteract local temperature increases from global climate change and help vulnerable communities adapt to a warming world.
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    Increased labor losses and decreased adaptation potential in a warmer world.
    (Nature communications, 2021-12) Parsons, Luke A; Shindell, Drew; Tigchelaar, Michelle; Zhang, Yuqiang; Spector, June T
    Working in hot and potentially humid conditions creates health and well-being risks that will increase as the planet warms. It has been proposed that workers could adapt to increasing temperatures by moving labor from midday to cooler hours. Here, we use reanalysis data to show that in the current climate approximately 30% of global heavy labor losses in the workday could be recovered by moving labor from the hottest hours of the day. However, we show that this particular workshift adaptation potential is lost at a rate of about 2% per degree of global warming as early morning heat exposure rises to unsafe levels for continuous work, with worker productivity losses accelerating under higher warming levels. These findings emphasize the importance of finding alternative adaptation mechanisms to keep workers safe, as well as the importance of limiting global warming.