Publications

BackgroundWorking for pay, either after school or during the summer, is a usual part of teenage life throughout the US and Canada, with up to 80 percent of high school students working at least some time during the course of a year.Young workers (under age 25) are employed in multiple industries and engage in many types of tasks and, as a result, are exposed to a variety of workplace hazards, including operating dangerous tools, machinery, and vehicles and handling cash in settings prone to robbery.Training is sometimes minimal and adult supervision limited.Employers may not fully understand the laws or be motivated to comply with them or they may not recognize that these inexperienced workers need special attention.Those charged with enforcement may not have sufficient support to carry out their duties, in part because the public and policymakers are unaware of the importance of the issue.Despite these downsides, work can be an important component of adolescent development, helping teens and young adults develop valuable work skills, exercise autonomy, and achieve a greater degree of competence and financial independence.Literature related to the health and safety of young workers appears in the domains of public health, youth development, social psychology, education, economics, labor law, and organizational psychology.However, there is very limited integration across these disciplines.Consequently, guidance for practice and policy can be fragmented at best.A report of the National Research Council (NRC), Institute of Medicine [1998] revealed a number of issues associated with young worker safety and youth development and made nearly 20 recommendations about surveillance, research and intervention efforts to improve safety for young workers, relying mostly on literature from public health and youth development.In the time since the NRC report was published, progress has been made in both research and programmatic efforts, but continued advancement of understanding and improvements in programs and policies are still important. The symposia seriesThis series of symposia was designed with a goal of helping synthesize perspectives from a diverse group of participants so as to advance understanding of the benefits and risks of youth employment by bridging several disciplines and setting an agenda for future scientific and programmatic directions throughout the US and Canada.

Changes in soil organic carbon, evapotranspiration, and S and Se atmospheric deposition are predicted to decrease S and Se concentrations in Europe soils.

International audience

Abstract. We investigate the impact of future climate variability on the potential vulnerability of soils to erosion and the consequences for soil organic carbon (SOC) in European croplands. Soil erosion is an important carbon flux not characterized in Earth System Models. We use a~European implementation of EPIC, driven by reference climate data (CNTRL), and climate data with reduced variability (REDVAR). Whether erosion regimes will change across European cropland depends on the spatial conjunction of expected changes in climate variability and physiographic conditions conducive to erosion. We isolated the effect of erosion by performing simulations with and without erosion. Median CNTRL and REDVAR erosion rates equalled 14.4 and 9.1 ton ha−1, and 19.1 and 9.7, for 1981–2010 and 2071–2100, respectively. The total amount of carbon lost from European cropland due to erosion was estimated at 769 Tg C for 1981–2010 (from a total storage of 6197 Tg C without erosion) under CNTRL climate. Climate trend impacts reduce the European cropland SOC stock by 578 Tg C without – and by 683 Tg C with erosion, from 1981 to 2100. Climate variability compounds these impacts and decreases the stock by an estimated 170 Tg without erosion and by 314 Tg C with erosion, by the end of the century. Future climate variability and erosion will thus compound impacts on SOC stocks arising from gradual climate change alone.

Our understanding of regional net carbon flux from land-based ecosystems and land-use changes has been evolving and improving as more data and advanced models become available. However, the size and attribution of carbon sources and sinks related to existing and potential land-use and land-use change (LUC) activities are still often debated, especially in the context of climate change mitigation and carbon neutrality. In this presentation, we aim to convey several key messages derived from our recent findings based on updated data and newly developed models (mechanistic and machine learning-based).   Using a new bookkeeping model (i.e., LUCE), we demonstrate that LUC has contributed to global net CO2 emissions, with forest-related activities (e.g., deforestation, reforestation) dominating changes in carbon fluxes. LUC could shift from a net carbon source to a net carbon sink in some regions with extensive gains in forest area particularly due to reforestation and afforestation. However, upon further examination of future land-use scenarios, we find that the large potential of carbon sequestration estimated from newly grown forests should be scrutinized from both ecological and socioeconomic perspectives. The role of the land sector in the global carbon budget could change over time and space, but an urgently needed positive change (from a carbon source to a sink) relies heavily on what we can and decide to do next.