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Malnutrition is widespread and affects about one-third of humanity. Increasing production and consumption of vegetables is an obvious pathway to improve dietary diversity, nutrition and health. This chapter analyses how climate change is affecting vegetable production, with a special focus on the spread of insect pests and diseases. A thorough literature review was undertaken to assess current global vegetable production, the factors that affect the spread of diseases and insect pests, the implications caused by climate change, and how some of these constraints can be overcome. This study found that climate change combined with globalization, increased human mobility, and pathogen and vector evolution has increased the spread of invasive plant pathogens and other species with high fertility and dispersal. The ability to transfer genes from wild relatives into cultivated elite varieties accelerates the development of novel vegetable varieties. World Vegetable Center breeders have embarked on breeding for multiple disease resistance against a few important pathogens of global relevance and with large evolutionary potential, such as chili anthracnose and tomato bacterial wilt. The practical implications of this are that agronomic practices that enhance microbial diversity may suppress emerging plant pathogens through biological control. Grafting can effectively control soil-borne diseases and overcome abiotic stress. Biopesticides and natural enemies either alone or in combination can play a significant role in sustainable pathogen and insect pest management in vegetable production system. This chapter highlights the importance of integrated disease and pest management and the use of diverse production systems for enhanced resilience and sustainability of highly vulnerable, uniform cropping systems.

While there is some evidence of bias against curly hair, this chapter provides a more comprehensive analysis by examining comments made by women about their hair experience, how it affects their identity, their experiences in the workplace and the challenges it presents to them in their decision to straighten their hair or leave it naturally curly. Utilising a qualitative inductive approach, we identify themes in the comments that could be tied to relevant theories and provide a framework for future research. This chapter also includes an empirical examination of individual beliefs regarding the impact of female hair texture (curly vs. straight hair) on others' perceptions of her and her workplace outcomes. Responses from 235 participants show that straight-haired women were rated significantly higher than curly haired women on job characteristics that are important to professional positions. Thus, a bias against curly haired women appears to exist in the workplace.

This study explores the price linkage between the Chinese commodity futures market and other dominant futures markets, and examines the forces behind the price linkages. The contribution by the trading hour innovations in the United States (or United Kingdom) market to the overnight price changes in the Chinese market is larger in scale than the contribution by the daytime information from the Chinese market to the overnight returns of the corresponding US (or UK) market. Several futures have significant interactions of the domestic and foreign factors in the price linkages while the Chinese domestic factors explain better the global market price linkage in some futures (aluminum, gold, and corn), demonstrating the leading role of the Chinese futures markets in these world markets.

How are our cities confronting the challenges posed by a warming climate, the loss of biodiversity, and the increasing urban heat island effect? ― This chapter discusses the opportunities and benefits of applying the concepts of renaturalization and rewilding of cities. It introduces nature-based solutions (NBS) in urban planning that are integrated with the aim to enhance urban resilience and to slow down the biodiversity decline, which can be applied in two areas: through the conception of new green neighborhoods and through the regeneration and regreening of existing but neglected parts of the city, such as postindustrial brownfields or economically weak districts.

Contact to nature is essential for human existence, urban well-being, and a good quality of life. Green spaces in cities – big or small – all contribute to health and well-being. However, many cities do not offer residents easy access to green space within the city. Improving better access and extending gardens and parks will deliver a large number of benefits, such as ecosystem services, better water management for enhanced urban flood control, and slowing down the biodiversity loss, with the potential to restore damaged ecosystems. Furthermore, additional green space and NBS help to keep cities cool during heat waves and improve the urban microclimate.

In this context, NBS and regreening can generate significant benefits for citizens, improve urban health and well-being, and offer an opportunity to effectively deploy nature to resolve major societal challenges ― such as social inclusion, food security, and disaster risk reduction. However, it is essential that the design of NBS is fully integrated with other complementary planning interventions and seeks synergies across all sectors.

Human beings spend their daily lives within the range of the atmospheric boundary layer, where airflow is affected by friction from Earth's surface. The airflow in this area is generally called wind. Strong wind occasionally causes severe damage to infrastructures and people because of its aerodynamic effects, but even weak and moderate winds can have serious environmental impacts on human society such as those seen with air-pollution problems and thermal effects.

It is not surprising that the dominant cognitive frame through which most audiences view climate change is that of an environmental problem. However, this messaging strategy has proven susceptible to counter-attacks, defensing processing, and other cognitive biases. As such, many environmental advocates are switching gears. From Barack Obama to Pope Francis, the environment-as-public-health-concern narrative is increasingly found in climate change messages. This strategy involves making the abstract issue of climate change more concrete by tying it to negative health impacts, like asthma, heat-related illness, and the spread of disease. Understanding why and for whom this strategy is persuasive, particularly in a social media context where users often encounter persuasive climate change messages, can help advance theory and practice.

The purpose of this chapter is two-fold: 1.) Test the effects of climate message frame (damage to nature or damage to public health), message source (liberal or conservative organization), and the use of visual human exemplars (present or absent) in social media messages; and, 2.) Assess the predictive utility of different conceptual frameworks (personification, construal level theory, and moral foundations theory) as explanatory mechanisms for persuasive social media climate message effects. The results of a nation-wide experiment reveal that the use of visual exemplars matters when climate change is framed as an environmental problem, but otherwise message frame, source, and visual exemplar use have little impact on policy attitudes. Further analyses demonstrated that multiple conceptual mechanisms related to the aforementioned theories help explain social media effects on climate change attitudes.

Climate change will affect tourism at several temporal and spatial levels. This chapter focuses on the quantification of effects and the development of strategies to reduce extremes and frequencies as well as thresholds in tourism areas. Knowledge about possibilities for mitigation and adaptation of current and expected climate conditions requires interdisciplinary approaches and solutions. Several examples are presented, including the effects of trees against climate change and extreme events (heat waves), behavior adaptations, urban and regional planning measures, bioclimatic conditions in the Mediterranean and human–biometeorological conditions under climate change conditions, and user-friendly computer tools for the quantification of urban bioclimate conditions.