The authors evaluated the effects of a large-scale ethanol cooking fuel promotion program in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and found substantial uptake of ethanol cooking. However, alternative fuels were not fully replaced under this scheme. The report concludes that improving the relative convenience of ethanol as a cooking fuel is needed to achieve broader positive impacts. 

Exertional heat illness poses a significant risk for workers, athletes, and military personnel participating in outdoor activities during hot weather. An important component of heat safety is monitoring environmental conditions through heat stress indices like the wet bulb globe temperature (WBGT), which accounts for factors such as air temperature, humidity, wind, and sunlight, and adjusting activity as conditions get progressively hotter.

Oceans@Duke Director Stephanie Rousso discusses her personal experience working with women fisherfolk to promote sea turtle conservation in an opinion for Frontiers in Ocean Sustainability. "Globally, women are blending traditional knowledge with modern science, taking on challenges head-on, and redefining what it means to work toward a sustainable ocean," she writes. "While these global initiatives are empowering women at a large scale, my personal journey has shown me how deeply transformative their contributions can be at the grassroots level."

This report empirically examines the determinants of private participation in flood mitigation programs that use a payment for ecosystem services (PES) framework and suggests improved PES program designs and enhancements to their flood mitigation effectiveness. It offers evidence suggesting income from farming and potential participants' past experiences with PES programs may increase participation in programs aiming to mitigate flooding and that in turn could reduce economic damages from flooding impacts.

Extreme heat directly impacts health and can exacerbate substance use. Rural communities face high risks due to those areas’ higher rates of heat-related hospitalizations and disproportionate effects of substance use. This commentary explores the connection between heat and substance use in rural communities and proposes policy, research, and practice recommendations that can be tailored to fit the local rural context.

Increased need for electricity is driving elevated demand for power companies to rapidly build out their generation capacity. But Nicholas Institute research shows that, with strategic timing of load use, such demand could be met by the existing power grid.

The Nicholas Institute's Tim Profeta contributed an essay to "How to Advance Environmental Protection During a Turbulent Era," a special section in the March/April issue of Environmental Forum. The Trump administration is expected to take up a deregulatory agenda—which environmentalists anticipate with trepidation but which businesses generally welcome as an appropriate relaxation of regulations they say inhibit a creative free market and stymie investments in needed projects.

Increasing plastic waste pollution has led to a rising prevalence of the open burning of plastic waste, especially in locations lacking formal waste-management systems. Poor, urban communities in the Global South face particularly acute challenges in accessing both organized waste-collection services and low-cost traditional energy sources, and clean cooking fuel alternatives tend to be unaffordable for their low-income residents.

A key solution to the United States' soaring electrical demand—driven by unprecedented electricity needs from large commercial customers, particularly data centers and their booming artificial intelligence workloads—is load flexibility. This analysis provides a first-order estimate of the potential for accommodating such loads with minimal capacity expansion or impact on demand-supply balance.

Concentrated animal feeding operations, particularly hog and poultry farms, have expanded rapidly in North Carolina in recent decades. The air pollution and water contamination they generate cause many environmental and health problems for local communities. Using the universe of farm characteristic and housing transaction data in North Carolina, the authors recover hedonic estimates of property value impacts from exposure to these industrial livestock operations.