This study aims to gain more understanding on highland farmers’ adaptation towards the impacts of climate change in Malaysia. Via a multi-stage cluster sampling, this quantitative study has surveyed a total of 400 highland farmers as respondents. The results indicated that the highest climate change-resilient farmers were from Kundasang, specifically among the females, Dusun ethnic group, and those who work side jobs to cover household expenses. Furthermore, recorded factors such as age and years of experience yielded significant negative relationship with adaptation whereas income yielded significant positive relationship with adaptation. The paper concludes with recommendations related to occupational diversification, consistent information disseminations, access to financial assistance, and the need to empower extension officers and local leaders in the hope that a comprehensive approach can help implement any community climate change-adaptation plan.

There has been a growing concern in the dry zone of Sri Lanka that the contaminated surface and ground waters and ecohydrological changes are possibly linked to a number of health issues and overall well-being of village communities, including the widespread renal failure termed as chronic kidney disease of unknown aetiology (CKDu). Two types of data were collected for this study, namely qualitative data from key informant interviews and abstracts of 33 peer-reviewed research articles during the past decade. A total of 35 key informants were recruited, mainly from communities in the northern dry zone region where a higher number of CKDu patients have been reported. The interview transcripts were examined using a range of techniques including content, thematic and semantic network analyses. The findings of the research articles were explored through a word cloud analysis. The study indicates that CKDu seems to be influenced by multifactorial ecohydrological changes linked to anthropogenic stressors such as inefficient use of fertilisers and weedicides in agriculture. This situation is made further complicated by factors such as high fluoride level and hardness of local groundwater. Inappropriate agricultural and water policies and poor governance are other factors, particularly little or no restriction on the use of agrochemicals and pumping of groundwater and limited access to clean municipal water supplies. The key informants indicated grave concerns on the flow on effects of poor surface and groundwater quality in the region on health, livelihood and well-being of communities. There are also inevitable economic implications such as loss of human capital and families losing assets to pay for ongoing health issues. The study highlighted the need for more in-depth research to better understand how the surface and groundwater quality influence CKDu and other health conditions in the region. Furthermore, there is a need for implementing an active water quality management strategy with emphasis on developing locally relevant guidelines, educational programmes and integrated heath monitoring programmes in the region.

Acute coronary syndrome (ACS) is a major public health concern worldwide. Few studies have directly evaluated the associations between ambient temperature and ACS incidence. To explore the association between ambient temperature and ACS emergency hospitalizations in the area of subtropical monsoon climate, data on ACS emergency hospitalizations were collected from two highest-ranking hospitals in the central urban area of Yancheng, China, from January 1, 2013, to December 31, 2018. We applied the time-series method to investigate the potentially lagged and non-linear effects of ambient temperature on ACS using the generalized linear model combined with the distributed lag non-linear model after adjusting for time trend, day of the week, holiday, and relative humidity. We identified a total of 5303 cases of ACS emergency hospitalizations during the study period. The exposure-response curves between ambient temperature and ACS hospitalizations were inverse “J-shaped.” The effects of extreme low temperature on ACS hospitalizations occurred on the present day and lasted for 3 days, followed by the harvesting effect. The effects of extreme high temperature occurred on the present day and lasted for 5 days. The cumulative relative risks of ACS were 2.14 [95% confident interval (CI): 1.32 to 3.47] for extremely low temperature and 1.66 (95% CI: 1.33 to 2.06) for extremely high temperature over the lag of 0–5 days, compared with the reference temperature (25.0 °C). Both low and high temperatures were significantly associated with higher risks of emergency hospital admissions for ACS in Yancheng, China.

According to the World Health Organization, in 2015, the Serbian population ranked among the highest ones in Europe in terms of smoking habit: 44.3% males and 36.2% females aged 18–64 smoked tobacco. In the last 7 years, 25% of total mortality in men and 9% in women from Serbia were associated with smoking. Tobacco smoking is one of the most important sources of exposure to many toxic substances in general population. Our study confirmed higher blood levels of two toxic metals, cadmium and lead, in the blood of smokers (3.5 and 1.5 times higher than in non-smokers, respectively). Furthermore, smoking habits, such as number of smoked cigarettes per day, smoking period and cigarette type, along with age, were shown to influence these metals’ blood concentration. Higher blood levels of Cd and Pb were found in smokers consuming more than 10 cigarettes per day for more than 10 years. The present study also highlighted the importance of the controlled tobacco production, since it was shown that consumption of illicit tobacco could manifold the exposure to toxic metals that can subsequently increase the frequency of related diseases as well.

Denitrification plays an important role in nitrogen (N) removal in freshwater ecosystems. Aquatic plants might have an impact on the sediment denitrification of water body, especially in macrophytes-dominated lake; however, there were different opinions about it. Our hypothesis was that the sediment denitrification rates differ significantly in different vegetation zones and seasons because of direct and indirect effect of the aquatic plants. Therefore, we studied sediment denitrification in Dongping Lake, a typical macrophytes-dominated lake located in the north of China. The acetylene inhibition technique was used to quantify the sediment denitrification rates (DRs) in the Phragmites communis (P. communis) zone, aquaculture zone, Potamogeton crispus (P. crispus) zone and mixed vegetation zone in July (summer), October (autumn), December (winter) of 2015 and March (spring) of 2016. The results showed that the average DRs were significantly higher in the P. communis zone (69.0 ± 91.6 μmol N m⁻² h⁻¹) than the mixed vegetation zone (8.70 ± 5.44 μmol N m⁻² h⁻¹), and the average DRs represented significant seasonal difference as in the order of winter (74.5 ± 88.3 μmol N m⁻² h⁻¹) > autumn (15.7 ± 18.6 μmol N m⁻² h⁻¹) ≈ summer (10.7 ± 5.90 μmol N m⁻² h⁻¹) > spring (3.85 ± 1.29 μmol N m⁻² h⁻¹). The DRs generally decreased with the increasing of depth; however, significant increase of DRs with depth were found in certain seasons at the vegetated zones except the non-vegetated zone (the aquaculture zone) indicating the possible rhizosphere effect of aquatic plants on denitrification. The higher DRs and cycling rates of nitrate in the P. communis zone might be related to the larger biomass and oxygen transporting capacity of P. communis than those of the other aquatic plants. Winter peaks of DRs might be attributed to the higher NO₃⁻ load and the absence of the plant uptake. The high cycling rates of nitrate in Dongping Lake indicated an enhanced internal N cycling by aquatic plants. Sediment denitrification could remove about 537.7 t N every year, which was about 26.5% of annual TN loading in Dongping Lake.

Irrespective of how plastics litter the coastline or enter the sea, they pose a major threat to birds and marine life alike. In this study, an artificial intelligence tool was used to create an image classifier based on a convolutional neural network architecture that utilises the bottleneck method. The trained bottleneck method classifier was able to categorise plastics encountered either at the shoreline or floating at the sea surface into eight distinct classes, namely, plastic bags, bottles, buckets, food wrappings, straws, derelict nets, fish, and other objects. Discerning objects with a success rate of 90%, the proposed deep learning approach constitutes a leap towards the smart identification of plastics at the coastline and the sea. Training and testing loss and accuracy results for a range of epochs and batch sizes have lent credibility to the proposed method. Results originating from a resolution sensitivity analysis demonstrated that the prediction technique retains its ability to correctly identify plastics even when image resolution was downsized by 75%. Intelligent tools, such as the one suggested here, can replace manual sorting of macroplastics from human operators revealing, for the first time, the true scale of the amount of plastic polluting our beaches and the seas.

Olive mill wastewater (OMW) is characterized as a high-strength effluent due to the high organic load, low biodegradability, and presence of phytotoxic compounds. Most of the OMW treatment methods proposed, including adsorption, focus mainly on the reduction of chemical oxygen demand and recovery of polyphenols. Adsorption studies aiming at nutrient removal from OMW are very limited. In the present work, Ca(OH)₂-treated zeolite (CaT-Z) in a granular form was used for simultaneous recovery of phosphate (PO₄³⁻) and potassium (K⁺) ions from two samples of anaerobically digested OMW. Nutrient adsorption was investigated as a function of contact time, pH and dilution of OMW with deionized water. The lower removal efficiency of phosphorus (P) by CaT-Z was observed at higher dilution ratios consisted of 3.125–6.25% OMW-1 and 5% OMW-2. The maximum P removal was 73.9% in 25% OMW-1 and 85.9% in 10% OMW-2. Potassium removal, as the predominant cation of OMW samples, increased from 17.3 to 46.1% in OMW-1 and from 15.1 to 57.7% in OMW-2 with increasing dilution. The maximum experimental adsorption capacities were 15.8 mg K and 2.14 mg P per gram of CaT-Z. Five sequential treatments of 50% OMW-2 with fresh CaT-Z at each stage ensured a cumulative removal of 87.5% for P and 74.9% for K. Adsorption kinetics were faster for K than for P. The plant-available P was found to be the predominant fraction on the loaded CaT-Z. Electron Probe Micro-analysis confirmed the enhanced content of K and P on the loaded CaT-Z, whereas X-ray mapping revealed the co-distribution of Ca and P. This study demonstrates the potential usage of CaT-Z as an immobilization medium of P and K from anaerobically treated OMW.

A simple approach was developed for the rapid and accurate estimation of 5-day biochemical oxygen demand (BOD₅) in food processing wastewater. Immobilization of the natural microbial consortium that was collected from an aerobic compartment of a food processing wastewater treatment plant was simply performed by adhesion using a low-cost porous carrier. Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Bacillus cereus, and Streptomyces, whose salt-tolerance and ability to break down organic compounds have been widely reported, were found to be predominant. These microorganisms may cause an enhancement of the bioreactor response in the presence of sodium chloride. Consequently, a modified glucose-glutamic acid (GGA) calibration standard was proposed in which an appropriate amount of NaCl was added; this solution was found to be more effective in terms of accuracy and practicality than both conventional GGA and the synthetic wastewater recipe from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The calibrated self-built packed-bed bioreactor exhibited good precision of 3% or less in predicting BOD₅ in influent, which is similar to the performance of the most common commercial biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) bioreactors. There was a statistical agreement between the results obtained from this rapid BOD biosensor and the conventional methods, even when testing treated wastewater samples.

Phosphorus is an essential element in the food production chain, even though it is a non-renewable and limited natural resource, which is going to run out soon. However, it is also a pollutant if massively introduced into soil and water ecosystems. This study focuses on the current alternative low-cost technologies for phosphorus recovery from livestock effluents. Recovering phosphorus from these wastewaters is considered a big challenge due to the high phosphorus concentration (between 478 and 1756 mg L⁻¹) and solids content (> 2–6% of total solids). In particular, the methods discussed in this study are (i) magnesium-based crystallization (struvite synthesis), (ii) calcium-based crystallization, (iii) electrocoagulation and (iv) biochar production, which differ among them for some advantages and disadvantages. According to the data collected, struvite crystallization achieves the highest phosphorus removal (> 95%), even when combined with the use of seawater bittern (a by-product of sea salt processing) instead of magnesium chloride pure salt as the magnesium source. Moreover, the crystallizer technology used for struvite precipitation has already been tested in wastewater treatment plants, and data reported in this review showed the feasibility of this technology for use with high total solids (> 5%) livestock manure. Furthermore, economic and energetic analyses here reported show that struvite crystallization is the most practicable among the low-cost phosphorus recovery technologies for treating livestock effluents.