222 results match your criteria: "Institute for Environmental Decisions[Affiliation]"

Culture can have a major impact on how we perceive different hazards. In the Romantic period, nature was described and portrayed as mysterious and benevolent. A deep connection to nature was perceived as important.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study examined how caregivers and regulatory experts predict which household chemicals are appealing to children, involving 95 four-year-olds and their caregivers who ranked these products.
  • It found that both adults and children had similar views on child-appeal ratings, especially when evaluating products with child-appealing images.
  • The research highlighted that while adults can generally estimate child-appeal, significant individual differences exist among children, suggesting that education for caregivers on these variations is more crucial than just regulating product features.
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Article Synopsis
  • * Key issues include difficulties in collecting and accessing reliable data, as well as the need for standardized information to enhance decision-making effectiveness.
  • * A user-friendly and adaptable data tool is seen as essential for veterinarians, particularly independent practitioners, to monitor health conditions, visualize disease prevalence, and receive timely alerts for better disease management.
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Tropical cyclones (TCs) displace millions every year. While TCs pose hardships and threaten lives, their negative impacts can be reduced by anticipatory actions like evacuation and humanitarian aid coordination. In addition to weather forecasts, impact forecast enables more effective response by providing richer information on the numbers and locations of people at risk of displacement.

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Protection motivation when using biocidal products - A survey study in Germany.

Environ Sci Pollut Res Int

August 2024

Consumer Behavior, Institute for Environmental Decisions (IED), ETH Zurich, CHN J 75.2, Universitaetstrasse 22, 8092, Zurich, Switzerland.

Article Synopsis
  • Biocidal products can pose health and environmental risks, and there's uncertainty about how well private users understand and follow safety instructions.
  • A study involving 957 German participants examined their attention to and comprehension of use instructions for an insect spray, exploring factors that influence their motivation to protect against risks.
  • Findings showed higher protection motivation is linked to increased attention to instructions, perceived threats, responsibility, self-efficacy, and effectiveness of adhering to guidelines, suggesting ways to improve regulation and user compliance for safer use.
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Next-Generation Risk Assessment (NGRA) aims to implement New Approach Methodologies (NAMs) into risk assessment and to rely on new in vivo testing in animals only as a last resort. However, various technical and regulatory hurdles impede their regulatory implementation. Assumptions about the public's expectations could act as barriers to the acceptance of NAMs.

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Three decades ago, several articles on the subjectivity in chemical risk judgments (i.e., labeled "intuitive toxicology") measured the divide between the public and toxicologists with different backgrounds regarding the validity of predicting health effects based on in vivo studies.

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Natural hazards pose significant risks to people and assets in many regions of the world. Quantifying associated risks is crucial for many applications such as adaptation option appraisal and insurance pricing. However, traditional risk assessment approaches have focused on the impacts of single hazards, ignoring the effects of multi-hazard risks and potentially leading to underestimations or overestimations of risks.

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The terms "New Genomic Techniques" (NGTs) or "Genome Editing" refer to various methods that allow finding, cleaving, and repairing specific sequences in the genome. These techniques could contribute to managing various challenges in plant breeding and agriculture. Aside from regulatory uncertainties, the lack of consumer acceptance has frequently been cited as a significant barrier to the widespread use of NGTs in plant breeding and agriculture across the planet.

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Article Synopsis
  • - Soil fungi are essential for global biodiversity and are crucial in agricultural ecosystems, but the impact of arable farming on their distribution, particularly rare species, is not well understood.
  • - A study examining 217 sites across Europe found that arable lands had lower fungal diversity compared to grasslands, with geographic factors influencing community structures.
  • - The research indicates that arable farming leads to a decline in rare fungal groups, emphasizing the need for sustainable agriculture practices to protect these taxa and their essential ecosystem services.
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Demands to manage the risks of artificial intelligence (AI) are growing. These demands and the government standards arising from them both call for trustworthy AI. In response, we adopt a convergent approach to review, evaluate, and synthesize research on the trust and trustworthiness of AI in the environmental sciences and propose a research agenda.

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Human group B Streptococcus (GBS) infections attributable to an invasive, hypervirulent sequence type (ST) 283 have been associated with freshwater fish consumption in Asia. The origin, geographic dispersion pathways and host transitions of GBS ST283 remain unresolved. We gather 328 ST283 isolate whole-genome sequences collected from humans and fish between 1998 and 2021, representing eleven countries across four continents.

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Appropriate management decisions are key for sustainable and profitable beef and dairy farming. Data-driven technologies aim to provide information which can improve farmers' decision-making practices. However, data-driven technologies have resulted in the emergence of a "data divide", in which there is a gap between the generation and use of data.

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This study investigated preschool children's categorization and risk perception of products with ambiguous product characteristics (e.g., food-like packaging).

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Heat-related mortality has been identified as one of the key climate extremes posing a risk to human health. Current research focuses largely on how heat mortality increases with mean global temperature rise, but it is unclear how much climate change will increase the frequency and severity of extreme summer seasons with high impact on human health. In this probabilistic analysis, we combined empirical heat-mortality relationships for 748 locations from 47 countries with climate model large ensemble data to identify probable past and future highly impactful summer seasons.

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Background: 3D laser-based photonic scanners are increasingly used in health studies to estimate body composition. However, too little is known about whether various 3D body scan measures estimate body composition better than single standard anthropometric measures, and which body scans best estimate it. Furthermore, little is known about differences by sex and age.

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Warnings on the labels of hazardous household chemicals (e.g. warning pictograms and use instructions) should create risk awareness and thus encourage safe storage, handling and disposal.

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Unlabelled: Fiscal resilience against disasters is vital for the recovery in the aftermath of climate hazards. Without swift access to available funds for disaster relief, damages to human and the economy would be further exacerbated. How insurance may influence fiscal performance over time and can increase fiscal resilience for today and under a future climate has not been looked at yet in detail.

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Biocidal products: Opportunities in risk assessment, management, and communication.

Risk Anal

February 2024

Global Product Stewardship, Research & Development, Singapore Innovation Center, Procter & Gamble (P&G) International Operations, Singapore, Singapore.

In the coronavirus disease 2019 era, biocidal products are increasingly used for controlling harmful organisms, including microorganisms. However, assuring safety against adverse health effects is a critical issue from a public health standpoint. This study aimed to provide an overview of key aspects of risk assessment, management, and communication that ensure the safety of biocidal active ingredients and products.

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Why alternative proteins will not disrupt the meat industry.

Meat Sci

September 2023

ETH Zurich, Institute for Environmental Decisions (IED), Consumer Behavior Universitätsstrasse 22, CHN J76.3, CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland. Electronic address:

The production of food, especially meat, has a high environmental impact. Many believe that the introduction of alternative proteins could substantially reduce animal meat consumption, resulting in a more sustainable food system. In this review, we critically evaluate the challenges and barriers that need to be overcome to ensure that these alternative proteins have the desired effects.

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Building stock management is becoming a global societal and political issue, inter alia because of growing sustainability concerns. Comprehensive and openly accessible building stock data can enable impactful research exploring the most effective policy options. In Europe, efforts from citizen and governments generated numerous relevant datasets but these are fragmented and heterogeneous, thus hindering their usability.

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