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The 2030 Agenda of the United Nations comprises 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 sub-targets which serve as a global reference point for the transition to sustainability. The agenda acknowledges that different issues such as poverty, hunger, health, education, gender equality, environmental degradation, among others, are intertwined and can therefore only be addressed together. Impl

Colour vision allows animals to use the information contained in the spectrum of light to control important behavioural decisions such as selection of habitats, food or mates. Among arthropods, the largest animal phylum, we find completely colour-blind species as well as species with up to 40 different opsin genes or more than 10 spectral types of photoreceptors, we find a large diversity of optic

Insects are an astonishingly successful and diverse group, occupying the gamut of habitats and lifestyle niches. They represent the vast majority of described species and total terrestrial animal biomass on the planet. Their success is in part owed to their sophisticated visual systems, including colour vision, which drive a variety of complex behaviours. However, the majority of research on insec

The ability to see colour at night is known only from a handful of animals. First discovered in the elephant hawk moth Deilephila elpenor, nocturnal colour vision is now known from two other species of hawk moths, a single species of carpenter bee, a nocturnal gecko and two species of anurans. The reason for this rarity - particularly in vertebrates - is the immense challenge of achieving a suffic

Transnational municipal networks (TMNs) have emerged as important actors in the global response to climate change. Environmentalists both within and outside governments have placed great expectations and hopes on these networks. Through their novel form of agency, TMNs are expected to provide cities with a form of ‘extra-legem’ empowerment in their responses to climate change. This empowerment is

This chapter introduces four different approaches that have tackled this issue: Environmental Economics, International Political Economy and Development Studies, Global Environmental Governance and Earth System Governance, as well as Political Ecology. It also introduces these perspectives and highlights their maincontributions to the literature in their historical context. The chapter discusses d

Ball rolling dung beetles use a wide range of cues to steer themselves along a fixed bearing, including the spectral gradient of scattered skylight that spans the sky. Here, we define the spectral sensitivity of the diurnal dung beetle Kheper lamarcki and use the information to explore the orientation performance under a range of spectral light combinations. We find that, when presented with spect

In this edited volume, we explored the contributions that political science as a discipline can offer to the evolving Anthropocene debate. The term Anthropocene denotes a new geological epoch in the Earth’s history in which humans have become the main drivers of planetary-wide changes. Some authors interpret this as good news, pointing to progress as a result of human ingenuity and the endless pos

Ants are ecologically one of the most important groups of insects and exhibit impressive capabilities for visual learning and orientation. Studies on numerous ant species demonstrate that ants can learn to discriminate between different colours irrespective of light intensity and modify their behaviour accordingly. However, the findings across species are variable and inconsistent, suggesting that

Anthropocene has become an environmental buzzword. It denotes a new geological epoch that is human-dominated. As mounting scientific evidence reveals, humankind has fundamentally altered atmospheric, geological, hydrological, biospheric, and other Earth system processes to an extent that the risk of an irreversible system change emerges. Human societies must therefore change direction and navigate

Over the past decades, it has become more and more obvious that ongoing globalisation processes have substantial impacts on the natural environment. Studies reveal that intensified global economic relations have caused or accelerated dramatic changes in the Earth system, defined as the sum of our planet’s interacting physical, chemical, biological and human processes (Schellnhuber et al. 2004). Cl

Visual opsins of vertebrates and invertebrates diversified independently and converged to detect ultraviolet to long wavelengths (LW) of green or red light. In both groups, colour vision largely derives from opsin number, expression patterns and changes in amino acids interacting with the chromophore. Functional insights regarding invertebrate opsin evolution have lagged behind those for vertebrat

The stomatopod crustaceans, or mantis shrimps, are colourful marine invertebrate predators. Their unusual compound eyes have dorsal and ventral regions resembling typical crustacean apposition designs separated by a unique region called the midband that consists of from two to six parallel rows of ommatidia. In species with six-row midbands, the dorsal four rows are themselves uniquely specialized

Electroelastic materials possess properties most attractive for the design of smart devices and systems such as actuators and sensors. Typical polymers show changes in shape under the action of an electric field, and vice versa, together with fast actuation times, high strain levels and low elastic moduli. This paper deals with an Ogden model inspired framework for large deformation electroelastic

Written by an international team of over sixty experts and drawing on over three thousand scientific studies, this is the first comprehensive global assessment of the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals, which were launched by the United Nations in 2015. It explores in detail the political steering effects of the Sustainable Development Goals on the UN system and the policies of

This paper presents the results from a longitudinal study of the process of developing and implementing a method for risk assessment in a public sector organisation over a period of 3.5 years. The study explores how people involved in this process viewed factors influencing the implementation and what effects the risk management process gave rise to. While a large share of previous research on thi

In this article, a dataset of age-depth modelling data, sedimentation rates and dust mass accumulation rates (MAR) from four loess-palaeosol sequences from the Carpathian Basin is presented. The dataset is related to the article “Detailed luminescence dating of dust mass accumulation rates over the last two glacial-interglacial cycles from the Irig loess-palaeosol sequence, Carpathian Basin”, publ