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1. Wastewater Monitoring Raises Privacy and Ethical Considerations

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TTS.2021.3073886  

   Jacobs, Danielle; McDaniel, Troy; Varsani, Arvind; Halden, Rolf U.; Forrest, Stephanie; Lee, Heewook (January 2021, IEEE transactions on technology and society)

   null (Ed.)

   Analysis of municipal wastewater, or sewage for public health applications is a rapidly expanding field aimed at understanding emerging epidemiological trends, including human and disease migration. The newly gained ability to extract and analyze genetic material from wastewater poses important societal and ethical questions, including: How to safeguard data? Who owns genetic data recovered from wastewater? What are the ethical and legal issues surrounding its use? In the U.S., both corporate and legal policies regarding privacy have been historically reactive instead of proactive. In wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE), the pace of innovation has outpaced the ability of social and legal mechanisms to keep up. To address this discrepancy, early and robust discussions of the research, policies, and ethics surrounding WBE analysis and genetics is needed. This paper contributes to this discussion by examining ownership issues for human genetic data recovered from wastewater and the uses to which it may be put. We focus particularly on the risks associated with personally identifiable data, highlighting potential risks, relevant privacy-enhancing technologies, and appropriate ethics. The paper proposes an approach for people conducting WBE studies to help them systematically consider the ethical and privacy implications of their work. 

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2. A Vision for Continental-Scale Biology: Research Across Multiple Scales

   https://doi.org/10.17226/27285  

   Committee_on_Research_at_Multiple_Scales_A_Vision_for_Continental_Scale_Biology (March 2025, National Academies Press)

   Not AvailableOur planet is facing many complex environmental challenges, including the loss of biodiversity and rapidly changing climate conditions, driven by intensifying human-nature interactions worldwide. Dramatic advances in the biological sciences over recent years are made possible by new tools to study life at many scales, from identifying mutations in a single gene to monitoring changes in plants, animals, and microbes over an entire continent. These tools have the potential to usher in a new era of continental-scale biology (CSB) in which researchers can combine data from various realms across organizational, spatial, and temporal scales, addressing questions on biological processes and patterns that cannot be answered by observations at either small or large scales alone. This report, prepared at the request of the National Science Foundation, sets out a vision for the development of CSB and identifies the research areas that could most benefit from multi-scale approaches. Advancing the use of CSB to address a wide range of biological and societal challenges will require the development of integrated conceptual frameworks and theories to guide research, deployment of emerging technologies, and development of a skilled workforce to synthesize the vast amounts of data from various sources. 

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3. Arctic Sea Ice Decline and Geoengineering Solutions: Cascading Security and Ethical Considerations.

   Bennett, Alec P. (May 2022, Challenges)

   Climate change is generating sufficient risk for nation‐states and citizens throughout the Arctic to warrant potentially radical geoengineering solutions. Currently, geoengineering solutions such as surface albedo modification or aerosol deployment are in the early stages of testing and development. Due to the scale of deployments necessary to enact change, and their preliminary nature, these methods are likely to result in unforeseen consequences. These consequences may range in severity from local ecosystem impacts to large scale changes in available solar energy. The Arctic is an area that is experiencing rapid change, increased development, and exploratory interest, and proposed solutions have the potential to produce new risks to both natural and human systems. This article examines potential security and ethical considerations of geoengineering solutions in the Arctic from the perspectives of securitization, consequentialism, and risk governance ap‐ proaches, and argues that proactive and preemptive frameworks at the international level, and es‐ pecially the application of risk governance approaches, will be needed to prevent or limit negative consequences resulting from geoengineering efforts. Utilizing the unique structures already present in Arctic governance provides novel options for addressing these concerns from both the perspec‐ tive of inclusive governance and through advancing the understanding of uncertainty analysis and precautionary principles. 

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4. Spatial and Temporal Patterns of Community Utilization of a Tribally Run Shellfish Toxin Testing Program in the Gulf of Alaska

   https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.07.01.25330576  

   Kennedy, Esther G; Harley, John R; Cellan, Shannon M; Lanphier, Kari; Feldpausch, Jeff; Whitehead, Christopher; Gribble, Matthew O; Roland, Hugh B (July 2025, medRxiv)

   ABSTRACT Rural shellfish harvesters, including many Alaska Native peoples, require safe access to wild shellfish for subsistence, food security, and cultural practices. However, wild shellfish may be contaminated with paralytic shellfish toxins, leaving harvesters with increased risks of significant illness or death. To manage these risks, the Sitka Tribe of Alaska Environmental Research Lab (STAERL) was established to test shellfish samples sent in by harvesters in the community and to support regular monitoring of select local beaches by tribal governments. Here, we investigated harvester utilization of this shellfish testing service from 2016-2024, comprising 299 samples sent in by local harvesters, and used generalized linear models to examine how annual testing rates varied by year, location, species, and species-based detoxification rates. We pay particular attention to differences that may reflect the influence of risk perceptions and accessibility of harvesting and testing on utilization (DOI: 10.5061/dryad.dfn2z35dr). We find that testing utilization has increased through time (1.278, 95% CI: 1.161, 1.407), testing rates are highest in spring and broadly similar between the other three seasons, testing rates in Sitka are much higher than those outside of it, and neither road accessibility nor species-based detoxification rates strongly affect testing rate ratios. These findings suggest that shellfish testing behavior is consistent despite seasonal variations in risk and convenience, but that the STAERL individual testing program provides a pathway to maintain established subsistence harvest practices while reducing poisoning risks. 

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5. The Potential of Stratospheric Aerosol Injection to Reduce the Climatic Risks of Explosive Volcanic Eruptions

   https://doi.org/10.1029/2023GL107702  

   Quaglia, I; Visioni, D; Bednarz, E M; MacMartin, D G; Kravitz, B (April 2024, Geophysical Research Letters)

   Abstract Sulfur‐rich volcanic eruptions happen sporadically. If Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) were to be deployed, it is likely that explosive volcanic eruptions would happen during such a deployment. Here we use an ensemble of Earth System Model simulations to show how changing the injection strategy post‐eruption could be used to reduce the climate risks of a large volcanic eruption; the risks are also modified even without any change to the strategy. For a medium‐size eruption (10 Tg‐SO₂) comparable to the SAI injection rate, the volcanic‐induced cooling would be reduced if it occurs under SAI, especially if artificial sulfur dioxide injections were immediately suspended. Alternatively, suspending injection only in the eruption hemisphere and continuing injection in the opposite would reduce shifts in precipitation in the tropical belt and thus mitigate eruption‐induced drought. Finally, we show that for eruptions much larger than the SAI deployment, changes in SAI strategy would have minimal effect. 

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