Understanding Open Access Publishing

Over the past month, no matter where in the world I was, there was a heat warning: from the West Coast to the East Coast of the US, and then all the way to London, England, where extreme heat led to unprecedented school and transit closures. Urban heat is a silent, escalating crisis as metropolitan areas are warming at 2x the worldwide average, and extreme heat is responsible for approximately 500,000 deaths annually. A team of Google Researchers has been building AI-driven heat resilience tools to help cities identify ways to lower exposure to extreme temperatures. These include mitigation measures like cool roofs, which increase rooftop reflectivity (albedo), and offer a highly cost-effective solution to protect vulnerable communities. In 2024, we provided 14 cities with rooftop reflectivity data to identify highly vulnerable neighborhoods and determine where cool roofs would yield the greatest temperature reductions. The data guided critical decisions across several cities, resulting in initiatives such as cool roof ordinances and adaptation plans. Now, we’re expanding access to the data through our Google Earth Engine App to 50+ cities around the world to help city planners make noticeable impact for urban communities. Here’s what makes this expansion so impactful: 🌡️ Precise Intelligence: We’ve developed a novel method to map rooftop reflectivity at the individual building level that allows city planners to move beyond neighborhood-level averages and prioritize specific, large-footprint buildings for targeted cool-roof retrofits 🌡️ Open Access: To ensure this data empowers decision-makers worldwide in an accessible manner, we’ve launched a new, high-resolution Heat Resilience Earth Engine App. 🌡️ Tangible Global Heat Mitigation: Our modeling demonstrates that targeted cool-roof planning using this data could mitigate extreme urban heat by up to 0.5°C (1.8°F) globally. You can explore the data and download the high-resolution data for yourself here ➡️ goo.gle/4f1gyDl Read more about the expansion here ➡️ goo.gle/4gY6Vru

We cannot talk about climate resilience in cities without talking about power structures or intersectional inequality. Conventional adaptation approaches still tend to treat urban vulnerabilities in a fragmented way, with infrastructural budgets decided in one room, while social equity policies are written in another. But extreme heatwaves as the ones we are currently experiencing (I’m currently melting in Sicily while writing this post), flash floods, and systemic displacement do not happen in isolation, they disproportionately compound the risks faced by marginalized residents, elderly, women and caregivers (who happen to be overwhelmingly women). An intersectional approach to urban planning and climate adaptation is about building a framework that recognizes these overlapping social and environmental injustices. Designing cities that work for women, migrants, and the most vulnerable is not a niche agenda or a "nice-to-have" add-on; I’m often told that my work is niche, while I consider it the basis of city making. In fact, it’s the blueprint we need to build safer, fairer, and more resilient environments for everyone. And until city planning shifts from technocratic checklists to a deeper model of spatial justice, our climate investments will continue to default to an imagined, privileged user, while the most marginalised keep on bearing the brunt of climate injustice. We need to stop planning for an imagined default user and start planning for the real world, which is far more diverse than our little bubble might suggest. True climate resilience cannot exist without spatial justice, and in turn, inclusion cannot exist without a shift in who holds decision-making power. How? This study by Andrea Rigon, published in Cities, explores this nexus and outlines the structural changes needed to redirect municipal efforts toward true intersectional equity in climate justice efforts. Link to the open-access paper below. https://lnkd.in/dUzdKEYu For the practicioners out there : how is your organization or city municipality moving past fragmented social policies to build truly integrated, climate-resilient policies/infrastructure? #UrbanPlanning #IntersectionalUrbanism #ClimateJustice #SpatialEquity

💡 Has science been helpful in providing measurement tools, especially indicators and metrics, to assess urban climate adaptation? Not yet. 🚀 While in Oslo for the Lead Authors Meeting of the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Cities, I’m pleased to share our latest article, now published in npj Urban Sustainability https://lnkd.in/eG2WT9J4 🪅 “Conventional approaches to indicators and metrics undermine urban climate adaptation” systematically examines how current measurement practices fall short of capturing real progress on adaptation in cities worldwide. Through a review of nearly 140 studies and more than 900 indicators and metrics, we uncover a highly fragmented measurement landscape that often fails to meet the needs of adaptation decision-making. Key findings include: 🧱 The dominance of input- and output-focused metrics that track effort and immediate results rather than long-term impact. 🏚️ A strong bias toward city-scale indicators, with far less attention to neighbourhood and household scales. 📜 Limited integration of governance, social, and economic dimensions in measurement frameworks. 🧠 A lack of theoretical grounding and practical guidance amid a sea of highly technical, uncontextualised proposals. 🫵 Insufficient attention to units of measurement, intended users, and real-world applications. This research is essential reading for scientist, practitioners, policymakers, and climate (adaptation) professionals seeking more meaningful urban adaptation, and more meaningful ways to measure it, for learning, accountability, and impact. Let's discuss. 💡 Indicators matter. In every field. But it’s not only about the indicator itself, it’s about the ecosystem of actors, applications, and interpretations around it. Global efforts such as the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) can help clarify measurement needs, but urban adaptation challenges are complex, cross-sectoral, and deeply interconnected. Much more work is needed to support practitioners, policymakers, and researchers in applying and learning from ongoing urban adaptations. 👉 https://lnkd.in/eG2WT9J4 #openaccess 🙏 This work has been a long time in the making, from early ideas, through a lengthy review process, to finally seeing it out. Huge thanks to all the co-authors (Andressa V. Mansur, Samraj Sahay, Ph.D, Laura Helmke-Long, Massimiliano Granceri Bradaschia, Ane Villaverde García, Leire Garmendia Arrieta, Prince Dacosta Aboagye, PhD, PISEP, Patricia Mwangi (PhD, MISK), William Lewis, Obed Asamoah, Patricia Mwangi (PhD, MISK), borja izaola, Dr Ellie Murtagh and Ira Feldman ) for their dedication, patience, and collaboration, and to International Platform on Adaptation Metrics for planting the seed that made this work possible. IMAGINE adaptation European Research Council (ERC) BC3 - Basque Centre for Climate Change 💭 Dr. Diana Reckien Dr Stacy-ann Robinson A/Prof Johanna Nalau Emilie Beauchamp Sean Goodwin

📣 𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐜𝐥𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐳𝐚𝐫𝐝𝐬 𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐤𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐜𝐥𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐤 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐞𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝𝐰𝐢𝐝𝐞? 🔥🌎 👉 Find out in my open access article published today in 𝘌𝘯𝘷𝘪𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘭 𝘙𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘩 𝘓𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴: https://lnkd.in/daqEKJAM 🔧 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭’𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐲? I analysed nationally representative survey data from 142 countries (N = 128,093) collected as part of World Risk Poll. The dataset includes information on whether (a) respondents experienced a climate-related hazard in the last five years, whether (b) they see climate change as a threat to their country in the next 20 years, and (c) a multidimensional resilience index combining individual, household, community, and societal resilience factors. 💡 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐝𝐢𝐝 𝐈 𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐝? 1️⃣ People who have experienced a climate-related hazard are more likely to consider climate change a 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘰𝘶𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵 compared to those who didn't within the same country. These effects are consistent across eleven hazard types and, for heatwaves, comparable in magnitude to the effect of having a university education. 2️⃣ At the same time, it is not the case that countries with widespread exposure to climate-related hazards show higher overall levels of climate risk perception. The data set allowed me to disentangle country-level patterns from the strong individual-effects described in 1️⃣ — in contrast to another recent large-scale study that did not measure individual-level exposure (but measured subjective attribution): https://lnkd.in/dk4rGVEt 3️⃣ Resilience does not clearly amplify or dampen the link between experience and perception. For some hazards, there seems to be a positive trend, for others a negative one. 4️⃣ There is marked variation between countries, and this appears to differ across hazards. For example, hurricanes, mudslides, and wildfires show similar effects across countries, while the effects of earthquakes, sandstorms, and droughts vary strongly across countries. 📄 The paper discusses these results, limitations, and avenues for future research: https://lnkd.in/daqEKJAM 🔥🌎 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐝𝐨𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐦𝐞𝐚𝐧 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐜𝐥𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧? Billions of people are already living with the impacts of climate change. As these experiences accumulate, we may see rising demand for climate action. But without political leadership and media that connect the dots, those experiences alone will not drive the transformation we need.

FINALLY. The world's first true stochastic climate physical-risk system goes OPEN SOURCE. Today RiskThinking.ai is launching the Climate Risk Commons(TM): a not-for-profit, founded and funded by RiskThinking.AI, that puts the same enterprise-grade physical climate-risk platform the world's largest banks use into your hands. Free for non-commercial research. Nothing in it is a demo. What you get: ▪ The same engine that powers the world's largest financial institutions, reached through CDTexpress: 50+ climate hazards, 241 billion geospatially aligned locations, 193 countries, all IPCC emissions scenarios, 15-time horizons to 2100. ▪ The Open Climate Risk Framework™ (OCRF): the spec, asset schema, and contracts that make results comparable across teams, firms, and vendors. ▪ Ecofusion, the open reference pipeline. It runs the entire standard end-to-end on a laptop or a cluster. Apache 2.0, with terms you can hand to your legal office. ▪ Python and R SDKs, sample notebooks, a validated impact-function library, a conformance test suite, and full documentation. ▪ An environment stocked with open datasets, plus the freedom to upload your own data, models, and damage functions. What you can do with it, often in an afternoon: ▪ Load real asset or loan-book addresses and get flood, heat, and wildfire exposure for the assets you hold, not a headline figure. ▪ Stand up a CMIP7 stress test: stochastic, multi-pathway, thousands of scenarios, in a structure a supervisor can read and an auditor can follow. ▪ Design and test new damage functions, then publish results anyone can replicate, because everyone is on the same schema, conformance suite, and engine. ▪ Screen a city, infrastructure plan, or development portfolio for priority physical risks and share the method with anyone who needs it. ▪ Be among the first to work on CMIP7, the new generation of climate science. CMIP6 data stopped at 2014. One thing you do not get, because clarity cuts both ways: our proprietary high-fidelity commercial data. That stays with paying customers, and its revenue is what sustains the open platform. Same machinery, different data. That honesty is the deal. Nineteen institutions are already on board: universities and research institutes across Canada, the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Cyprus, Israel, Sweden, and Brazil, alongside the Central Bank of Brazil. Membership is free for non-commercial research. Individual researchers apply with proof of institution and a sentence on intended use. A faculty or university can enrol everyone at once with a short letter of intent. Details: www.riskthinking.org Research access: academic@riskthinking.ai   Open-source community: opensource@riskthinking.ai

Slightly late but here: Excited that this paper that examines the impact and cost-effectiveness of 40 commonly used interventions in #foodsecurity #nutrition and #climate #resilience is finally out. We did this paper jointly with the @Innovation Commission for Climate Change and I led the team from International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), while also being an advisor overall. The nice thing about the paper is that for the first time (I think) there's an analyses of available causal evidence to understand and measure impact as well as cost-effectiveness in the food, climate resilience space. We reviewed more than 600 papers to understand and measure these. The analysis includes studies with experimental designs–such as randomized control trials–or high-quality quasi-experimental designs, as well as meta-analyses. To be included, studies had to measure primary outcomes associated with food security (yield, profit, income, consumption, etc.), nutrition (BMI, prevalence of anemia, etc.), and climate (reforestation, resilience to shock, etc.). We also distinguished between 'Great Evidence', Good evidence and make operational recommendations that can be used by funders to design high impact programmes. Here's the paper https://lnkd.in/eE2_3iVD and this is the ''money slide'' where the axes refer to the consistency and quantity of evidence. Cash and in-kind transfers and graduation programmes are great bets.... University of Chicago, Tilman Brück, Kyle Murphy, Jess Rudder, Maximo Torero, Karen Macours, Paul Winters, Joshua W. Deutschmann Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), Tisorn Songsermsawas, Lenyara Fundukova and many others.

📢 Our new open-access paper is out in Urban Climate on using three plan evaluation approaches to better understand how Arizona cities are advancing heat resilience. We find that the plans have high-quality participation and coordination but lack detail on vulnerability and climate change uncertainty. We also found opportunities to better target heat mitigation policies to the highest heat risk areas, diversify heat-related policies, and improve plan integration efforts. This study is the culmination of several years of plan evaluation work through the SW-IFL with Sara Meerow, Malini Roy, Shaylynn Trego, Saeideh Sobhaninia, and many University of Arizona and Arizona State University students. https://lnkd.in/gK5FxHfq #extremeheat #climatechange #urbanplanning #heatresilience #planevaluation

The Congo Basin and the Amazon together form the living green heart of our planet. Yet the Congo Basin remains far less studied, far less resourced and far less understood. Today, there are just over 100 publishing environmental scientists across Congo Basin countries, compared to more than 6,000 working in the Amazon. We undertook the work of the Science Panel for the Congo Basin: to bring together the scientific knowledge necessary to inform global climate policy and strengthen regional scientific capacity, to identify key knowledge gaps and to call for increased funding to train a generation of scientists. Last year at COP30 in Belém, we launched the Executive Summary of our report, Resilience and Sustainability in the Congo Basin: Retracing the Past, Looking to the Future. The full report is now being released as an open-access digital volume published by Springer, with chapters becoming available as they are finalised. This 40-chapter, 800-page work represents one of the most comprehensive scientific assessments ever undertaken on the Congo Basin. During the coming weeks, in my capacity as Special Envoy of the Science Panel for the Congo Basin and one of the editors-in-chief of the report, I will share some of these chapters with you as they become public, along with some thoughts from me on each of them, explaining and why the findings matter. I hope that will be of some interest to you. Today, to kick things off, here is the Executive Summary – which makes clear exactly why these rainforests, which for many years were my and my family’s home, matter. It can be found here: https://lnkd.in/e46FY36f It has truly been a privilege to serve as an editor-in-chief on this project, alongside Bila-Isia Inogwabini, Bonaventure Sonké and Lydie Stella Koutika, working closely with section editors Jean-Jacques Braun, Raphael Tshimanga, Kate Abernethy, Averti Suspense IFO and Denis Jean Sonwa, and with the support of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, Springer Nature and our partners and sponsors. A central objective of this effort was to ensure the report would be fully open access. By doing so, we aim to strengthen scientific capacity across the region and ensure that researchers, students and institutions in Congo Basin countries have unrestricted access to the knowledge needed to understand and protect these globally critical forests. It is our hope that this work will help bring greater global attention, scientific investment and policy focus to the Congo Basin in the years ahead. I look forward to your thoughts on what we publish. Executive Summary: https://lnkd.in/eYwTDPNK Full volume (in progress): https://lnkd.in/exCxG-_Y

🔥 Paper Alert! Most heat related deaths and incidents occur indoors, yet research has primarily focused on outdoor conditions for heat vulnerability assessment. Until now. 👇 👉 Led by Calvin J Lin, we have developed a methodology to assess indoor heat risk during compound extreme events—heatwaves coinciding with power outages. Using Austin, TX as a case study, we mapped over 200,000 single family homes to building archetypes using local property records, then applied physiologically-based survivability metrics rather than traditional, temperature-based, comfort metrics. ❗We find that under current conditions, already 85% of buildings pose significant heat risk for elderly (+65) occupants during extreme events. With projected climate change and urban heat island effects, this rises to 95% in the future. For younger (18-40) populations, extreme heat vulnterability jumps from 15% to 65% of buildings. ‼️ We also identified three distinct building vulnerability profiles and demonstrated that many buildings currently considered safe will cross into dangerous territory without intervention. This "transitional building stock" represents a clear target for retrofits and emergency planning. 🫵 Our work shows that the built environment will increase its role in protecting us from climate dangers. As compound extreme events become more common, we as building scientists and designers, need to shift from comfort-based design to survivability-focused resilience planning. 📰 Open Access: From Comfort to Survival: Indoor Heat Vulnerability during Extreme Events 🔗 https://lnkd.in/gBErb23m Co-authors: Dru Crawley (Bentley Systems) Dev Niyogi (Jackson School of Geosciences at The University of Texas at Austin) and Marc Coudert (City of Austin) Built Environment at TU/e

Thrilled to share our #new #open-#access #publication in #Silva #Fennica (Vol. 59, No. 2): “#Drought and vegetation #dynamics in the #drylands of the Arganeraie Biosphere Reserve (#Morocco): toward an understanding of environmental #shocks on the agro-sylvo-pastoral #system.” Published on 24 Oct 2025. 🌵 Why this matters The #Arganeraie is a unique agro-sylvo-pastoral socio-ecological system. Yet, it is increasingly exposed to climate #variability and recurrent droughts that threaten productivity, biodiversity, and livelihoods. Our work brings evidence to guide resilience strategies for local stakeholders. 🛰️ What we did We combined #long-#term climate analysis (temperature, precipitation, SPEI-6/12), multi-temporal #NDVI trends (2000–2020) by crop type (argan, cereals, palms, mixed cereals), and #Random #Forest land-use/land-cover mapping and change detection to quantify ecosystem dynamics (1983–2020). 📌 Key findings • #Drought #intensification: Significant, persistent decline in SPEI indicates worsening meteorological drought. • #Land cover losses: Agricultural and woodland areas decreased over time, while degradation signals rose. • #Vegetation stress: Annual and seasonal NDVI trends are negative for argan, cereals, palms, and mixed cereals. • Actionable #insights: We discuss resilience pathways for socio-economic actors across the ABR. 🤝 Authors & affiliations Brahim Meskour, Adnane Labbaci, Moussa AIT ELKADI, Oualid Hakam, Victor Ongoma, Mohammed Hssaisoune, Abdellaali Tairi, Mohammed EL HAFYANI, Lhoussaine Bouchaou — with contributions from Université Ibn Zohr and UM6P - University Mohammed VI Polytechnic teams. 🔗 Read the article (open access): https://lnkd.in/dRTB4-Nh DOI: https://lnkd.in/dawX_sEy #Morocco #Arganeraie #Drought #Resilience #RemoteSensing #GeoAI #Agroforestry #Sustainability #SilvaFennica