Global Socio-Economic and Environmental Dimensions of GM Maize Cultivation

The increased population density, coupled with changes in dietary habits in developing countries towards high quality food and the increasing use of grains for livestock feed is projected to increase demand for food production by 70% by 2050. Crop yields would continue to grow but at a slower rate than in the past. Yield growth will play an important role as only a slow expansion of agricultural land is expected. Future yield increases on lands currently supporting high production levels must come from continued yield enhancing genetic modifications. The most important grain and feed is maize. Genetic improvement has not only contributed to yield increases but also to other desirable plant components such as resistance to lodging and tolerance to increased plant populations, insects, and diseases. Maize production has increased from 200 million tons in 1960 to over 800 million tons in 2011 but has not changed very much recently. The reviews suggest that the overall assessment of farm-level costs and benefits of GM maize has severe limitations. Nonetheless, GM maize is a potential tool to increase farmers’ income and thus might contribute to poverty reduction and sustainable social and rural economic development, especially in developing countries. The results support the contention that the adoption of GM maize leads on average to a higher economic performance, i.e., benefits, for farmers than conventional (non-GM) crops. An important finding of the analysis is that the kind and magnitude of benefits are heterogeneous across crops, traits, countries and regions. However, while the literature on the economic impact of GM crops has grown in recent years there is still a need for more comparative studies across space and time in order to pin down these impacts and allow for a better assessment of the contribution that this technology can make to sustainable development.

1976-2019年间安全科学的合作网络演变

近年来,人们有兴趣了解安全科学学科的性质,并对其发展模式和研究趋势有了深入见解。本文分析了合作出版的普遍性和规模的演变,以及安全科学研究界的宏观合作规模。此外,对核心研究人员合作网络中具有影响力的研究课题的演变分析也为该领域的高层发展趋势提供了启示。我们发现,自《安全科学》的前身《职业事故杂志》创刊以来,科学合作的普遍性和规模都在急剧增加。研究网络有了很大的发展,核心研究人员之间的合作也在稳步增加。尽管这表明已经形成了一个核心的安全科学研究群体,但也发现该期刊仍然是许多小型的、没有联系的作者集群的平台。在有影响力的研究课题方面,有一个明显的转变,即从工作安全的技术方面转向安全的心理和组织机制。最近,核心研究网络中有影响力的工作还将重点集中在安全和风险模型和方法、领域的概念和理论基础,和围绕特定行业的安全问题形成的有影响力的研究集群。核心研究人员合作集群的重点课题进一步突出了安全科学中共存的各种概念、理论和方法论。最后,该研究讨论了研究结果的多种含义,并强调了加强合作可能带来的好处和弊端,并概述了未来的研究途径。

Negotiated Complexity: Framing Multi-Criteria Decision Support in Environmental Health Practice

The complexity we take into account when dealing with complex issues and the way we deal with that complexity is not given or self-evident, it is framed and negotiated. Based on two environmental health decision support case studies we address a set of key methodological choices, crucial in shaping the multi-criteria decision support and illuminate how they followed from transdisciplinary collaboration and negotiation: diversity tolerance, dealing with uncertainty and difference of opinion, weight of information and the epistemological divide between traditional closed and alternative open paradigms. The case studies exemplify the growing conviction amongst methodologists that, especially regarding complex issues, best methods do not exist as such: methods are chosen and tailored in practice and the quality to a large extent is dependent on the process in which methodological development is embedded. We hope to contribute to making explicit the importance of methodological decision making regarding environmental health complexity.

The Impact of Low Fertility Rates on Labor Demand and Socioeconomic Development in China

The World Population Prospects report,published by the United Nations in 2022,revealed a decline in the global population growth rate(PGR)to less than 1%—the lowest recorded rate since 1950.Predictions suggest a further decrease to 0.5%by 2050,culminating in negative growth in more than 60 countries and intensifying the issue of population aging(1).China,a highly populous nation,is encountering even more acute challenges.By the conclusion of 2022,China’s population totaled approximately 1.412 billion,reflecting a decline of 850,000 from the prior year and a natural PGR of−0.06%(2).

The landscape of safety management systems research: A scientometric analysis

Safety management systems(SMSs)are widely applied across many industrial sectors,and a large body of liter-ature has been published addressing their design,implementation,effectiveness,and associated challenges.This article presents a high-level analysis of the SMS research domain,guided by a set of questions addressing the contents,structure,and evolution the research domain,its dominant themes and focus topics,the key scientific domains and journals contributing to its development,and the key publications serving as an intellectual basis for SMS related research.The results show a rapidly increasing volume of research outputs and a shift from re-search based in North America and Europe to Asia and Australia.There is only a limited number of institutions enduringly contributing to the field,and there are relatively few stable research collaborations,with the number of Chinese institutions publishing SMS related research fast expanding in recent years.The domain is strongly interdisciplinary and embedded in applied domains of science,with industrial engineering the most contribut-ing category,as well as categories focusing on the industrial application domains.A temporal evolution of the research activity in different application domains is apparent,with an initial focus on occupational health and safety,followed by process safety,patient safety,food safety,and construction safety.SMS research has a strong relation to safety culture and safety climate research,and while safety and risk management concepts and theo-ries form an important knowledge base for most application domains,the dominant views on accident causation differ between these.Research on SMS in the food industry is relatively separated from the other application domains.Based on the findings,various future research directions are discussed.

Collaboration networks evolution of Safety Science from 1976 to 2019

There is a recent interest to understand the nature of the safety science discipline and to obtain insights in its development patterns and research trends.This article analyzes the evolution of the prevalence and scale of collaborative publishing and the macro-level collaboration scale of the Safety Science research community.Additionally,an analysis of the evolution of influential research topics of the core researchers’collaboration networks provides insights in the domain’s high-level development trends.Both the prevalence and scale of scientific collaboration are found to have increased dramatically since the inception of Journal of Occupational Accidents,Safety Science’s predecessor.Research networks have grown significantly,and collaboration between core researchers has steadily increased.Even though this indicates that a core safety science research community has developed,it is also found that the journal continues to serve as a platform for many small and unconnected author clusters.In terms of influential research topics,there is a notable shift from technical aspects of work safety towards psychological and organizational mechanisms of safety.More recently,influential work of core research networks has additionally focused on safety and risk models and methods,the conceptual and theoretical foundations of the domain,and influential research clusters have formed around safety in specific industries.The focus topics of core researcher’s collaboration clusters furthermore highlight the variety of conceptual,theoretical,and methodological approaches co-existing within Safety Science.Various implications of the findings are discussed,where both possible benefits and drawbacks of increased collaboration are highlighted and future research avenues outlined.