IMAGE OF THE WEEK
A photo taken on the last day of field work, December 6, 2019, for a project that Bronwen Powell (pictured) and Abderrahim Ouarghidi were working on looking at the impact of irrigation technology change on diet, women’s workloads, and biodiversity in Morocco. It was only in this highest elevation village (Oukaimeden, which is over 2,600m) that there was snow, most of the other lower-elevation villages were just cold and rainy. Photo: Abderrahim Ouarghidi
GOOD NEWS
Doug Miller is on the team that recently won at the TechCelerator pitch competition hosted by the Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Central and Northern Pennsylvania. The team was awarded a $10,000 investment for their fledgling enterprise, RealForests.
Mahda Bagher passed her proposal defense on January 15.
COFFEE HOUR
The first Coffee Hour lecture for spring 2020 will be January 31. Arturo Izurieta, executive director of the Charles Darwin Foundation, will give a talk on Working on an old question “How many visitors can the Galapagos hold? Finding a sustainable model”
NEWS
Spring speakers for Coffee Hour lecture series announced
The Department of Geography Coffee Hour lecture series resumes on Friday afternoons beginning Jan. 31 through April 24 for the spring 2020 semester on Penn State’s University Park campus.
Institute for Computational and Data Sciences accepting seed grant applications
The Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS) is accepting applications for its 2020-21 seed grant program that will help fund projects that leverage Penn State expertise to help advance computation- and data-enabled research. Applications will be accepted now through Feb. 3 and awardees will be announced at the 2020 ICDS Symposium, which will be held March 16 and 17.
Spring 2020 EarthTalks series presents science toward solutions
Society faces increasingly complex problems as the world population grows and makes larger demands of the planet’s finite resources. The spring 2020 EarthTalks series, “Societal Problems, EESI Science towards Solutions,” features scientists from Penn State’s Earth and Environmental Systems Institute (EESI) and explores the human impacts on the global environment and how to apply this knowledge to decision-making.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
Immersive Virtual Field Trips Reader
Alexander Klippel
A compilation of eight research articles on virtual field trips by members of the ChoroPhronesis lab and Center for Immersive Experiences
https://www.dropbox.com/s/prs8c6tj17p81nf/iVFTReader2019.pdf?dl=0
Wives influence climate change mitigation behaviours in married-couple households: insights from Taiwan
Li-San Hung and Mucahid M. Bayrak
Environmental Research Letters
https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ab5543
Mitigating climate change requires collective action of various sectors and on multiple scales, including individual behavioural changes among citizens. Although numerous studies have examined factors that influence individuals’ mitigation behaviours, much less attention has been given to interpersonal influence. Children have been suggested to influence parents’ climate change concerns; however, how the interactions between couples—typically the primary decision-makers in married-couple households—influence each other’s climate change concerns has seldom been discussed. In this study, we surveyed married heterosexual couples to investigate the interdependency of husbands’ and wives’ motivations for behavioural change to mitigate climate change. We found that wives’ psychological constructs, including climate change risk perception, self-efficacy, and gender role attitudes, demonstrated stronger effects on their husbands’ motivation than did husbands’ own constructs on their own motivation, whereas husbands’ psychological constructs did not influence their wives’ motivation. Our results suggest the importance of wives’ role in motivating household climate change mitigation behaviours.