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The climate change and related impacts are experienced around the world. There arise different triggering factors to climate change and impact. The purpose of this study is to figure out how changes in vegetation cover may or may not have an impact to climate change. The research will produce ideas for vegetation preservation and replant.

The investigation was probed for 34 years’ time period starting from the year 1981 to 2015. After testing and checking for serial autocorrelation in the vegetation data series, Mann–Kendal nonparametric statistical evaluation was carried out to investigate vegetation cover trends. Sen’s method was deployed to investigate the magnitude of vegetation cover change in natural differential vegetation index (NDVI) unit per year. Furthermore, the ArcGIS spatial analysis tools were used for the calculation of mean NDVI distribution and also for carrying out the spatial investigation of trends at each specific location within the study region.

The yearly mean NDVI during the study period was observed to have a decreasing trend. The mean NDVI value ranges between 0.32 and 0.98 NDVI unit, and hence, this means from less or poor vegetated zones to higher or healthier vegetated zones. The mean NDVI value was seen decreasing toward the highlands regions. The NDVI-rainfall correlation was observed to be stronger than the NDVI-temperature correlation. The % area coverage of NDVI-rainfall positive correlation was higher than the negative correlation. The % area coverage of NDVI-temperature negative correlation was higher than the positive correlation within the study region. Rainfall is seen as a highly influencing climatic factor for vegetation growth than the temperature within the study region.

This study in this country is a new approach for climate change monitoring and planning for the survival of the people of Papua New Guinea, especially for the farmer and those who is living in the coastal area.

This research navigates the confluence of data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to revolutionize the management of urban services in smart cities. The study thoroughly investigated with advanced tools to scrutinize key performance indicators integral to the functioning of smart cities, thereby enhancing leadership and decision-making strategies. Our work involves the implementation of various machine learning models such as Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine, Decision Tree, Naive Bayes, and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), to the data. Notably, the Support Vector Machine and Bernoulli Naive Bayes models exhibit robust performance with an accuracy rate of 70% precision score. In particular, the study underscores the employment of an ANN model on our existing dataset, optimized using the Adam optimizer. Although the model yields an overall accuracy of 61% and a precision score of 58%, implying correct predictions for the positive class 58% of the time, a comprehensive performance assessment using the Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC-ROC) metrics was necessary. This evaluation results in a score of 0.475 at a threshold of 0.5, indicating that there's room for model enhancement. These models and their performance metrics serve as a key cog in our data analytics pipeline, providing decision-makers and city leaders with actionable insights that can steer urban service management decisions. Through real-time data availability and intuitive visualization dashboards, these leaders can promptly comprehend the current state of their services, pinpoint areas requiring improvement, and make informed decisions to bolster these services. This research illuminates the potential for data analytics, machine learning, and AI to significantly upgrade urban service management in smart cities, fostering sustainable and livable communities. Moreover, our findings contribute valuable knowledge to other cities aiming to adopt similar strategies, thus aiding the continued development of smart cities globally.

As part of a larger grant-funded project, a professional development (PD) series was conducted within the framework of a school–university partnership to improve teachers’ capacity to meaningfully include fathers and father figures in the school environment, with a particular focus on fathers of children with disabilities. The authors sought to understand the extent to which a school-wide PD framed through the lens of a father of a child with a disability might inform practice with sustainable implementation. Due to the pandemic, the original format of the PD was redesigned for virtual delivery.

A three-phase data collection and analysis approach included a pre-PD survey, a post-PD survey and a one-year follow-up survey. All surveys included both quantitative and qualitative self-report data components.

Results suggest school personnel found the virtual PD valuable, gleaning several useful strategies for reflecting on their own practices, working to improve communication with families of children with disabilities and more meaningfully including fathers and father figures in future school-related activities and programing.

First, the sample size of the present study was small, and participation was variable across PD sessions. In addition, participants self-selected into the series, and therefore, they may be more likely to value father-figure involvement with or without participation in the PD series. The small sample size may minimize the generalizability of these results across other replicable settings and participants. Second, the results of the pre-PD survey could be positively skewed since the university partner’s initial delivery of PD related to this topic began in 2018. In the pre-PD survey, the majority of respondents indicated, as an example, that they believed father involvement was correlated with higher academic achievement. It is not clear if respondents held these beliefs independently at the inception of the partnership or if they perhaps learned of these connections during an earlier PD offered by the authors.

The current study offers a small glimpse into the world of a school–university partnership and its ability to actualize meaningful reflection on family engagement practices. Results also indicate a greater awareness of significant male figures/fathers and their needs. Content delivered during each PD supports capacity building in terms of teachers’ ability to see fathers and father figures as meaningful contributors within the context of the school environment. Participants mentioned that the PD taught them ways to recognize and remediate some of the insidious communication barriers that exist.

Participants stated that they grew in their understanding of intentional connections with significant male figures, noting a concerted effort to ensure communication of information pertaining to school events, conferences and, in some cases, individualized educational programs (IEPs). Staff members also felt as though the pandemic fostered greater connections with fathers who were working at home and who were simultaneously helping their children access online learning platforms. However, it is noteworthy that the latter benefit was likely a positive side effect of mandatory home-based learning as opposed to a direct result of the present study. Socially, the authors all find ourselves embarking on a bit of social uncertainty, where perhaps it is no longer appropriate or significant to mention one's gender. Nonetheless, the research highlights the unique contributions that fathers and father figures can make to children's positive trajectory, and the authors espouse that the current study suggests that virtual PD sessions can help train school personnel to recognize and foster such relationships.

The past few decades have ushered in an awareness of significant male involvement and its importance in the development of young children. Despite this surge of interest, the research on father/significant male involvement in the school context remains limited. Additionally, the implementation of virtual PD and its potential positive impacts remain largely unexplored, especially when the intersection with father engagement practices is considered. As such, the authors espouse that the present study reflects a unique combination of content and pedagogy.

Carbon dioxide emissions affect the environment, presenting major implications for sustainable development and consequently model climate change policies. The main aim of the paper is to highlight the factors leading to CO2 emissions in Latin America.

The analysis was performed using data for 1990–2020 and panel regression and STATA software.

The results highlighted that the variables have significantly influence CO2 emissions in case of the countries in the sample.

The novelty of the paper consists in using all financial inflows of together (foreign direct investment, official development assistance and remittences), Latin America heavily in-flowed with remittances from the USA. Since Latin America is enriched with forest areas, the authors also covered this variable in the estimations. Urbanization and transportation are induced by remittance inflows, thus wellbeing was incorporated in the model. The conclusion of the study demonstrates the need for complex measures involving public-private partnerships, public awareness of the need for energy transition and the involvement of foreign-owned companies that must not only pursue their own interests but also generate positive economic, environmental, and social externalities in host countries.

Many European countries suspended mandatory conscription after the Cold War, and especially between 2000 and 2010. However, with the changing security situation in Europe, more and more countries are considering the re-introduction of the draft. That is why, it is important to evaluate the impact of conscription on draftees, including its effect on fertility outcomes. Additionally, fertility is of particular interest because birth rates have been below replacement levels in most European countries at least in the last two decades. This, combined with the increase in life expectancy, has contributed to aging population and raises concerns about the future economic prospects and sustainability of the continent. Military service could be related to fertility in several ways. Compulsory service for men would affect the marriage market and subsequently child-bearing outcomes. For example, men who serve in the military would have to delay higher education at least by a year, given that they plan to continue their education after high school. One possibility is that this leads to older men meeting younger women if partners meet at college. Alternatively, in case the partners know each other prior to the draft, service could delay marriage by up to a year due to the conscription, postponing planning and having children, and potentially having fewer children as women might be less able or less willing to have a child after a certain age. Finally, some men who plan and would otherwise continue their education might choose to not do so or to further postpone it once they disattach from studying during their service. For some men, this might influence their marital and subsequent fertility outcomes. In either of these scenarios, a draft or its suspension is likely to be connected to fertility.

This study examines the effect of the suspension of the draft in Spain in December 2001 on three fertility outcomes of men that would have been drafted in the absence of the suspension. The author performs the analysis in a difference-in-differences framework. Potential concerns and policy implications are also discussed.

The findings suggest that after the suspension of the draft, individuals started to have their first child earlier given that they decide to have children. Consistent with the overall time trend, they became less likely to have a child and started to have fewer children. However, the age at birth of the first child decreased while the number of children and the likelihood of having a child increased for men relative to women, after compared to before the suspension of the mandatory draft.

The author extends prior literature by investigating the effect of the abolition of compulsory military service in Spain in December 2001 on fertility. This is novel is several ways. First, to the best of the author’s knowledge, previous literature has examined the effect of this Spanish reform only on labor market outcomes prior to men's conscription. Second, even for other countries that terminated the compulsory draft, fertility has been under-studied, providing an opportunity for further exploration. Third, this analysis is based on rich Census data, representative of the population in Spain. Finally, given the inconclusive findings of previous studies for other countries and the proposed re-introduction of the draft in some parts of Europe, additional evidence of the effect of the conscription has important policy implications necessary for the evaluation of future military service policy decisions.

This chapter more clearly identifies the distinction between Electronic Health Record (EHR) and Electronic Medical Record (EMR), and states their value in obtaining individual-level data. Synthetic medical records may be used as a surrogate for EHR data in order to ensure digital data privacy is maintained during the development of the LHS. Synthea is an open-source simulation tool available through GitHub.¹ Extensive descriptive analysis of synthesized data is provided as a foundation for the analysis in Chapter 7.

The purpose of this study is to test the local impact of COVID-19 pandemic on hotel performance at the individual property level, and further examine the roles of hotel attributes and business mix in potentially moderating or intensifying the impact of a crisis.

Using a sample of 5,090 hotel properties in Texas, USA from January 2020 to December 2021, this study estimates a monthly hotel performance model to evaluate how the pandemic affected hotels’ operational performance based on revenue per available room.

Results show that a 10% increase in the monthly number of confirmed COVID-19 cases led to a 0.522% decrease in hotel performance. Also, a series of moderators were identified within the pandemic–performance relationship: the negative impact of the pandemic was more severe among higher-end hotels and newer hotels; urbanization and localization diseconomies prevailed during the pandemic; and there was a smaller negative effect of COVID-19 on high rated hotels in the category of economy hotels.

The moderators highlighted in this paper shed light on the heterogeneity of COVID-19’s effects on hotel operations. Findings enrich the hospitality literature by considering business resilience in relation to the pandemic.

This study investigates the impact of the increasing proportion of older workers in the workforce by establishing a theoretical framework and estimating the degree of substitutability between them and their younger counterparts.

The first step is to establish a theoretical framework that combines older and younger workers with imperfect substitutability in the production of final goods within an aggregate production function. The author then derives an equation that relates the relative wage, relative supply and elasticity of substitution between the worker types, for use in estimation. Using data from Japan’s Basic Survey on Wage Structure and Population Census from 2010 to 2019 across 47 prefectures, the author estimates the elasticity of substitution between older and younger workers in Japan.

The author finds that workers aged 55 and over and their younger counterparts are gross substitutes, and the estimated elasticity of substitution is in the range of 2.33–2.86. This implies that a 10% increase in the relative number of workers aged 55 and older leads to a fall in their relative wage in the range of 3.5–4.3%. The study estimations suggest that since 2010, there has been a convergence in the relative wage of older workers across Japan’s prefectures.

Understanding the degree of substitutability between older and younger workers is essential for quantitatively assessing the impact of workforce aging, technological advancements and labor policies on the wage distribution. This study estimates the elasticity of substitution between the two worker types based on a theoretical model, and utilizes recent datasets and methodology not adequately addressed in previous literature.

Key international and intergovernmental organizations assess the size of the Roma population in Serbia to be around 4–600.000, rendering Serbia among the five countries in Europe with the highest percentage of Roma population. Although Roma in Serbia have a long history of self-organization, cultural and media organizations, and are formally recognized as national minorities with a National Council of the Roma National Minority as a body with political decision-making influence, the Roma community in Serbia, as in most other European countries, is the most disadvantaged and underprivileged group in the country, often living in underdeveloped neighbourhoods with limited access to social services, especially education and health.

The educational attainment of the Roma population in Serbia, as in other countries in Europe, is far below the attainment of the general population. The education indicators are showing a developing trend, albeit slow. Roma integration policies evolved in Serbia from the early 2000s in the general policy framework of Equity of Education and Inclusive Education and a comprehensive education reform agenda, promoted and legally endorsed by the 2009 Law on the Foundations of the Education System. As the consequence of such an approach, the Roma integration policies intertwined and mutually reinforced with other reform policy areas. The most important post-2000 policies supporting the integration of Roma students into education are the introduction of pedagogical assistants in elementary schools and preschool institutions as a profession, paid from the budget, abolishing the system of school readiness assessment, introducing individual education plans and intensifying affirmative action and scholarships for enrolment in secondary and tertiary education.

The study aims to investigate the impact of highly skilled emigration from Greece on the innovation performance of the Greek economy.

The study draws on a new, census-scale, database that includes all the Greek Ph.D. holders and on statistical information pooled from various secondary sources.

The mass emigration of highly educated Greek scientists that was exacerbated during the ten-year recession has had detrimental effects on Greece's innovation performance. Specifically, an increase in the number of highly skilled emigrants has a negative impact on scientific citations and on patent applications during the following year. An instrumental variable approach based on gravity model literature is employed to test the authors’ findings. The potential effects of these findings and policy suggestions are also discussed.

The study enriches the academic and policy discussion on the science and technology–related consequences of brain drain on the origin country. This is the first study that focuses on Greece – the country which experienced the highest emigration rates within the EU during the severe ten-year economic crisis – and sheds light on the impact of skilled emigration on its innovation performance.