Choosing the right COVID-19 indicator: crude mortality, case fatality, and infection fatality rates influence policy preferences, behaviour, and understanding

Individuals worldwide are overwhelmed with news about COVID-19. In times of pandemic, media alternate the usage of different COVID-19 indicators, ranging from the more typical crude mortality rate to the case fatality rate, and the infection fatality rate continuously. In this article, we used experimental methods to test whether and how the treatment of individuals with different types of information on COVID-19 is able to change policy preferences, individual and social behaviours, and the understanding of COVID-19 indicators. Results show that while the usage of the crude mortality rate proves to be more efficient in terms of supporting policy preferences and behaviours to contain the virus, all indicators suffer from a significant misunderstanding on behalf of the population.

From crisis to reform? Exploring three post-COVID pathways

Crises are often viewed as catalysts for change. The coronavirus disease crisis is no exception. In many policy sectors, proponents of reform see this global crisis both as a justification and an enabler of necessary change. Policy scholars have paid ample attention to this crisis-reform thesis. Empirical research suggests that these proponents of crisis-induced change should not be too optimistic. The question remains why some crises give rise to reform whereas so many others do not. This paper focuses on one particular factor that crisis researchers have identified as important. Crisis research suggests that the outcome of the meaning-making process—the efforts to impose a dominant frame on a population—shapes the prospects of postcrisis change. The paper offers three ideal-typical framing scripts, which researchers can use to study postcrisis trajectories.

Effectiveness of Local Community Policy Responses to Climate Change Impact on Ecosystem Services for Biodiversity Conservation in the Semi-Arid Zones

The Ugandan government has decentralized climate change policy strategies at the local government district development planning levels to build local community adaptive capacity for accelerated action for disaster resilience. This chapter focuses on the local community response by Isingiro local government district authority. The purpose is to provide a context of the significance of eco-services and natural biodiversity resources in the semi-arid district, located in the South-Western Uganda, elaborate on the district climate change action plan for community-based adaptation strategies, and the biodiversity conservation district development plan. For decades, most households and local communities have perpetually suffered from the severe climatic stress of galloping heatwaves, shocking floods, ferocious frequent whirlwinds and wind storms, catastrophic droughts, perennial food insecurity, malnutrition, migrations, and famines. The district has adopted strategies to enhance biodiversity conservation for eco-services for food security and sustainable community livelihoods.

Moving paradigms - conservation agriculture with alternative agronomics to minimize inputs.

The African Union Malabo Declaration outlines goals to achieve sustainable production practices for economic growth in the agriculture sector by 2025. Conservation Agriculture (CA) practices represent a climate smart and resource friendly sustainable production system, and these need to be adopted and refined. This will be a paradigm shift for academics, experts and farmers who are embedded in the intensive external-input monoculture tillage systems. From our review of literature, recent history has shown that CA systems are successful and profitable while using less external inputs and expending less energy. Energy use can be reduced by 40% and labour needs by 50%-90%. Research has shown that CA farming is superior in terms of enhancing soil functions, biodiversity, beneficial insects, energy consumption, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and resilience to extreme climate events. Nitrogen and other essential elemental crop needs can be reduced by 10%-70% through CA systems. African research and farm testing have shown integrated CA cropping systems can control insect and weed pests while providing more diverse economic crops. For the paradigm shift to occur quickly, efficiently and economically, institutions need to lead change. Policy makers need to start strategic changes to research and institutions by initiating support programmes identified by innovative researchers and agricultural leaders that can move the Malabo dial towards the 2025 goals.

The Role of the Mask in Preventing and Controlling the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pandemic

Following the outbreak of novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), there have been debates among scientific communities, officials, and the public about the role of the mask in controlling and preventing this disease. Nonetheless, there are some ambiguities regarding various aspects of the mask which are still important to be addressed, including the type of the mask to be used, the situation in which the mask should be used, the correct way to use the mask, and the effectiveness of the mask in preventing the disease. Accordingly, addressing these ambiguities could change policy trends and public beliefs about the use of mask and help control the disease. To this end, this study discusses the role of the mask in preventing and controlling the COVID-19 pandemic.

Does Climate Change Policy Depend Importantly on Population Ethics? Deflationary Responses to the Challenges of Population Ethics for Public Policy

Choosing a policy response to climate change seems to demand a population axiology. A formal literature involving impossibility theorems has demonstrated that all possible approaches to population axiology have one or more seemingly counterintuitive implications. This leads to the worry that because axiology is so theoretically unresolved as to permit a wide range of reasonable disagreement, our ignorance implies serious practical ignorance about what climate policies to pursue. We offer two deflationary responses to this worry. First, it may be that given the actual facts of climate change, all axiologies agree on a particular policy response. In this case, there would be a clear dominance conclusion, and the puzzles of axiology would be practically irrelevant (albeit still theoretically challenging). Second, despite the impossibility results, we prove the possibility of axiologies that satisfy bounded versions of all of the desiderata from the population axiology literature, which may be all that is needed for policy evaluation.

Depoliticizing And Humanizing Climate Change Through A Public Health Frame: A Case Study Of Ontario’s Climate Change Policy Discourse

The relevance of a public health frame in supporting the climate change impact awareness and consensus on actions is well recognized but largely underutilized. Overall, supporting public health’s capacity in climate change has focused on projecting and highlighting public health impacts due to climate change, identifying public health policy responses, and emphasizing public health role. The integration of the public health perspective in the discussion and communication of climate change ideas has remained elusive.<div>Climate change is also a complex social problem whose construction of meaning and actions is rooted in institutionalized language, discourse, and human interactions. Thus, understanding of the construction of the relevance of public health in climate change discourse is central to understanding the impediments of the public health frame application. Unfortunately, this has been a neglected area of research, and the dissertation responded to that gap. </div><div>To delineate the impediments of the public health frame, the study used the case study of the context of climate change policy discourse in the Province of Ontario (Canada) to examine the construction of public health relevance, the extent of public health frame application, and the systematic influences in the discourse.</div><div>The analysis of policy documents and key informant interviews revealed that the public health frame remained isolated from the primary focus of Ontario’s climate change policy discourse. Instead, Ontario’s historically and socially constructed climate change as an economic and political issue solved through market strategies and technological innovations forwarded by political, bureaucratic, and technological elites. The focus substantiated the types of structures and processes of policies and decisions, the relevant actors and knowledge, and the values supporting the discursive, normative, and strategic practices. Ontario’s focus also limited the utilization of the public health frame and the supporting capacities through the misalignment between public health and the provincial strategic actions, the lack of recognition and integration of public health roles, mandate and structures, and limited public health capacity building initiatives.</div><div>Therefore, public health framing as an endpoint of climate change discourse requires legitimation of public health in the underlying institutional structures for, and governance of, climate change. </div>