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Food insecurity is a growing concern due to man-made conflicts, climate change, and economic downturns. Forecasting the state of food insecurity is essential to be able to trigger early actions, for example, by humanitarian actors. To measure the actual state of food insecurity, expert and consensus-based approaches and surveys are currently used. Both require substantial manpower, time, and budget. This paper introduces an extreme gradient-boosting machine learning model to forecast monthly transitions in the state of food security in Ethiopia, at a spatial granularity of livelihood zones, and for lead times of one to 12 months, using open-source data. The transition in the state of food security, hereafter referred to as predictand, is represented by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Data. From 19 categories of datasets, 130 variables were derived and used as predictors of the transition in the state of food security. The predictors represent changes in climate and land, market, conflict, infrastructure, demographics and livelihood zone characteristics. The most relevant predictors are found to be food security history and surface soil moisture. Overall, the model performs best for forecasting Deteriorations and Improvements in the state of food security compared to the baselines. The proposed method performs (F1 macro score) at least twice as well as the best baseline (a dummy classifier) for a Deterioration. The model performs better when forecasting long-term (7 months; F1 macro average = 0.61) compared to short-term (3 months; F1 macro average = 0.51). Combining machine learning, Integrated Phase Classification (IPC) ratings from monitoring systems, and open data can add value to existing consensus-based forecasting approaches as this combination provides longer lead times and more regular updates. Our approach can also be transferred to other countries as most of the data on the predictors are openly available from global data repositories.

Climate change is threatening the health of current and future generations of children. The most recent evidence from the Lancet Countdown: Tracking Progress on Health and Climate Change finds declining trends in yield potential of major crops, rising heatwave exposures, and increasing climate suitability for the transmission of infectious diseases, putting at risk the health and wellbeing of children around the world. However, if children are considered at the core of planning and implementation, the policy responses to climate change could yield enormous benefits for the health and wellbeing of children throughout their lives. Child health professionals have a role to play in ensuring this, with the beneficiaries of their involvement ranging from the individual child to the global community. The newly established Children in All Policies 2030 initiative will work with the Lancet Countdown to provide the evidence on the climate change responses necessary to protect and promote the health of children.

ABSTRACTThe transformations required to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals across the African continent demand new ways of mobilising, weaving together, and applying knowledge. Research, policymaking, planning, and action must be effectively inter-linked to address complex sustainability challenges and the different needs and interests of societal actors. Transdisciplinarity (TD) – the co-production of knowledge across disciplines and with non-academic actors – offers a promising, holistic approach to foster such transformations. Yet, despite increased application of TD over the past two decades, disciplinary and sectoral silos persist. TD is not well embedded in African academic institutions and, consequently, much SDG-related research is too narrowly framed and divorced from the action space to be effective. There is an urgent need to work collectively across disciplines and society for transformation towards more sustainable and equitable development pathways. Capacities to undertake collaborative, impactful research must be strengthened, and changes in research culture are needed to support relationship building. We explore these issues by drawing on two recent online social learning processes with researchers and practitioners working on sustainability issues and TD. In each process, we built on actors’ own experiences of TD by investigating institutional, practical, and theoretical challenges and enablers of TD. Here, we synthesise our learnings, alongside key literature, and explore avenues to better: a) promote and support TD within academic institutions across Africa; b) resource TD for sustainable partnerships, and c) strengthen TD practices and impacts to support transformation to sustainability across diverse places and contexts.

In the first of three articles we consider the mechanisms by which alcohol affects the human body and mind. In subsequent articles we will examine the impact of alcohol on health and social wellbeing and the support and health promotion measures that the nurse might use to assist patients. Alcohol has distinctive effects on physiology that are mediated by gender and the level of exposure to the drug over time. In this article we consider the ways in which alcohol acts as a mental stimulant and then as a depressant, and we examine how exposure reinforces further alcohol consumption. Consideration is given to how alcohol is metabolized and how it may then interact with other drugs within the body.

The present age is characterized by a very complex economic relationship among finance, technology, social needs, etc., which can be summarized in the word “sustainability.” The sustainable consumption and production policies represent the keys to realize sustainable development. But, the analysis of the carbon footprint data points out that the present economies are still carbon-consumption production. The reduction of greenhouse gasses emissions is based on a shift from fossil to renewable and bio-based industrial raw materials, with a related reorganization of the chains of the energy and manufacturing sectors. But, this requirement implies technological choices based on a sustainable measurement of their impacts on the ecological and economical contexts. So, social and economic requirements must also be taken into account by the decision-makers. Bioeconomy can represent a possible approach to deal with the requirements of the present time. But, new needs emerge in relation to sustainability. So, sustainable policies require new indicators, in order to consider the link among economics, technologies, and social well-being. In this paper, an irreversible thermodynamic approach is developed, in order to introduce a thermoeconomic indicator, based on thermodynamic optimization methods, but also on socioeconomic and ecological evaluations. The entropy production rate is introduced in relation to the CO2emission flows from human activities, and it is related to the income index, in order to consider the economic and social equity. This approach is of interest of the researchers in the field of econophysics, thermoeconomy, economics, and bioeconomy.

High ethanol intake is well known to induce both anxiolytic and anxiogenic effects, in correlation with chromatin remodeling in the amygdaloid brain region and deficits in cell proliferation and survival in the hippocampus of rodents. Whether only moderate but chronic ethanol intake in C57BL/6J mice could also have an impact on chromatin remodeling and neuroplasticity was addressed here. Chronic ethanol consumption in a free choice paradigm was found to induce marked changes in the expression of genes implicated in neural development and histone post-translational modifications in the mouse hippocampus. Transcripts encoding neural bHLH activators and those from Bdnf exons II, III and VI were upregulated, whereas those from Bdnf exon VIII and Hdacs were downregulated by ethanol compared with water consumption. These ethanol-induced changes were associated with enrichment in both acetylated H3 at Bdnf promoter PVI and trimethylated H3 at PII and PIII. Conversely, acetylated H3 at PIII and PVIII and trimethylated H3 at PVIII were decreased in ethanol-exposed mice. In parallel, hippocampal brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) levels and TrkB-mediated neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus were significantly enhanced by ethanol consumption. These results suggest that, in C57BL/6J mice, chronic and moderate ethanol intake produces marked epigenetic changes underlying BDNF overexpression and downstream hippocampal neurogenesis.

The diversification of agri-food products through emerging chains has a fundamental social and economic role in Ecuador. A substantial amount of research focused only on examining critical factors in terms of agronomic and environmental performance. However, there is a shift in the agri-food chain perspective and study towards more sustainable models of production, logistics trade, and consumption. Aspects such as the socio-economic sustainability, level of collaboration between actors, an adequate chain configuration, and the employment of smart governance mechanisms show the weaknesses where stakeholders can propose enhancements. In this respect, socioeconomic and productive factors are consequential and still affecting the progress of these chains. Also, the current growth of market opportunities at the local and international level is a driver to support them by setting sustainable strategies. This study aimed to analyze socio-economic and production aspects to understand the dynamic across the emerging Inca berry (Physalis peruviana) chain located in Ecuador and bring forward potential strategies. Thus, chain vertical and horizontal dimensioning was introduced to contribute with relevant insights. The framework applied accounts with a revision of primary and support activities, and flows of high and low relevance. The investigation clustered pre-production, production, and post-production tiers. Also, it executed the food chain mapping, the identification of chain actors, and application of surveys at the supply chain levels to identify strengths and weaknesses based on specific socio-economic and productive variables. Results stated several viable long-term strategies. Examples of those strategies are the diversification of marketing channels, the intervention of academic institutions to improve efficiency, productivity, and the associations' empowerment. All of them aimed at circular economic models. The main research contribution is the application of the chain configuration to assess the chain performance comprehensively. Based on the results, our recommendation is incorporating new indicators to analyze the environmental and institutional components profoundly.