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Category Archives: Mind Building
Dog domestication during ice age
Analysis of Paleolithic-era teeth from a 28,500-year-old fossil site in the Czech Republic provides supporting evidence for two groups of canids — one dog-like and the other wolf-like — with differing diets, which is consistent with the early domestication of dogs.
The study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, was co-directed by Peter Ungar, Distinguished Professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas.
The researchers performed dental microwear texture analysis on a sample of fossils from the Předmostí site, which contains both wolf-like and dog-like canids. Canids are simply mammals of the dog family. The researchers identified distinctive microwear patterns for each canid morphotype. Compared to the wolf-like canids, the teeth of the early dog canids — called “protodogs” by the researchers — had larger wear scars, indicating a diet that included hard, brittle foods. The teeth of the wolf-like canids had smaller scars, suggesting they consumed more flesh, likely from mammoth, as shown by previous research.
This greater durophagy — animal eating behavior suggesting the consumption of hard objects — among the dog-like canids means they likely consumed bones and other less desirable food scraps within human settlement areas, Ungar said. It provides supporting evidence that there were two types of canids at the site, each with a distinct diet, which is consistent with other evidence of early-stage domestication.
“Our primary goal was to test whether these two morphotypes expressed notable differences in behavior, based on wear patterns,” said Ungar. “Dental microwear is a behavioral signal that can appear generations before morphological changes are established in a population, and it shows great promise in using the archaeological record to distinguish protodogs from wolves.”
Dog domestication is the earliest example of animal husbandry and the only type of domestication that occurred well before the earliest definitive evidence of agriculture. However, there is robust scientific debate about the timing and circumstances of the initial domestication of dogs, with estimates varying between 15,000 and 40,000 years ago, well into the Ice Age, when people had a hunter-gatherer way of life. There is also debate about why wolves were first domesticated to become dogs. From an anthropological perspective, the timing of the domestication process is important for understanding early cognition, behavior and the ecology of early Homo sapiens.
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Materials provided by University of Arkansas. Original written by Matt McGowan. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Health24.com | Brake dust another driver of air pollution
Air pollution from brake pads may pose a significant respiratory health risk, British researchers say.
“At this time, the focus on diesel exhaust emissions is completely justified by the scientific literature, but we should not forget, or discount, the importance of other components, such as metals from mechanical abrasion, especially from brakes,” said study leader Ian Mudway, of MRC Center for Environment and Health at King’s College London.
“There is no such thing as a zero-emission vehicle, and as regulations to reduced exhaust emissions kick in, the contribution from these sources are likely to become more significant,” Mudway said in a UK Research and Innovation news release.
Brake dust is made up of metal particles from the abrasion of brake pads. The researchers conducted lab tests to assess how brake dust affects immune cells called macrophages, which help defend the lungs and kill bacteria.
Inhaling fine particle matter
The results showed that brake dust may cause inflammation and reduce the ability of macrophages to kill bacteria. And the effect is similar to that caused by diesel exhaust particles, according to the study published in the journal Metallomics.
Brake dust and diesel particles are sources of air pollution called fine particulate matter (PM2.5), which can be inhaled into the deepest areas of the lungs.
It’s estimated that only 7% of PM2.5 pollution along roads from traffic comes from vehicle exhaust fumes. The rest comes from sources such as tire, clutch and brake wear, as well as road dust thrown into the air by vehicles, the researchers say in background notes.
Brake dust accounts for about 20% of overall PM2.5 traffic pollution. These findings suggest that brake dust could increase the risk of airway infections and have other harmful effects on respiratory health.
‘London throat’
“Diesel fumes and brake dust appear to be as bad as each other in terms of toxicity in macrophages. Macrophages protect the lung from microbes and infections and regulate inflammation, but we found that when they’re exposed to brake dust they can no longer take up bacteria,” said study co-author Liza Selley, from University College London.
“Worryingly, this means that brake dust could be contributing to what I call ‘London throat’ – the constant froggy feeling and string of coughs and colds that city dwellers endure – and more serious infections like pneumonia or bronchitis which we already know to be influenced by diesel exhaust exposure,” Selley said.
Image credit: iStock
Boys with inattention-hyperactivity face increased risk for traumatic brain injuries
McGill-led research shows that boys exhibiting inattention-hyperactivity at age 10 have a higher risk for traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) in adolescence and adulthood. Treatments to reduce these behaviours may decrease the risk for TBIs.
“Traumatic brain injuries are the leading cause of death and disability in children and young adults, but little is known about the factors that provoke them,” says Guido Guberman, a doctoral and medical student in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University. The study published in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry is the first to show that childhood behaviours identified by teachers such as inattention-hyperactivity predicted subsequent traumatic brain injuries. The study also found that boys who sustained TBIs in childhood were at greater risk of sustaining TBIs in adolescence.
According to the researchers, TBIs occur in approximately 17% of males in the general population, yet there is little research about TBI prevention. To determine whether there is a link between inattention-hyperactivity and TBIs, they analyzed data from 724 Canadian males from age 6 to 34. They examined health files and collected information from parents when participants were aged six, then administered a questionnaire to the participants’ teachers on classroom behaviours when the participants were aged 10 years.
“To avoid suffering and disability, prevention strategies are needed, for example promoting cyclist safety,” says Guberman. “There are treatments that can decrease the severity of childhood inattention-hyperactivity and behavioural problems. Our results suggest that trials are necessary to determine whether these programs can also decrease the risk for subsequent traumatic brain injuries.”
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Materials provided by McGill University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
A new way to assess male fertility
Current tests for male fertility include measuring the concentration and motility of spermatozoa. However, other characteristics of sperm, such as their ability to follow a chemical trail to the egg, can influence the likelihood of fertilization. Now, researchers reporting in Analytical Chemistry have devised a quick and convenient microfluidic chip to assess this chemotactic response of spermatozoa, which could help provide a more complete picture of a man’s fertility.
Sperm use chemotaxis, or movement toward increasing or decreasing concentrations of a substance, to guide their journey through the fallopian tube to the egg. Progesterone is present at high concentrations in the fluid that surrounds the egg, and previous studies have indicated that the hormone can attract and activate spermatozoa of some mammalian species. Scientists have used microfluidic devices — plastic or hydrogel chips with tiny channels through which liquids flow in a highly controlled manner — to study sperm chemotaxis. But the devices have had various limitations, such as the need for pumps to drive the flow of fluid, which could affect sperm motility. Loes Segerink, Johanna Berendsen and colleagues wanted to develop an improved, pump-free microfluidic device that could quickly identify small differences in the chemotactic behavior of sperm.
The researchers designed a microfluidic chip about the size of a postage stamp. The chip, which they made with an agarose/gelatin material, contained various channels and side chambers. The researchers created a concentration gradient of progesterone in the device from left to right, and saw that more boar spermatozoa added to the device swam to the right side chambers (high progesterone) than the left (low progesterone), which shows chemotactic movement. In addition to fertility testing, the device could be used to investigate other substances that could also contribute to sperm’s guidance mechanism, the researchers say.
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Materials provided by American Chemical Society. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Health24.com | Measles leaves people more vulnerable to future infections
People who contract measles aren’t out of the woods after their rash fades and their fever subsides.
They’re then more vulnerable to other bacterial and viral infections – even those they’ve already been vaccinated against or have had before.
That’s because measles virus attacks the cells that serve as the immune system’s memory, wiping out established resistance to disease, a pair of new studies report.
As much as three-quarters of a person’s immune memory can be wiped out by the “amnesia” caused by the measles virus, one team of researchers reported in the November issue of the journal Science.
‘Immune system reset’
“The measles virus is resetting your immune clock to a naive state, and all of the protection you got by living through other viral and bacterial infections is reduced going forward,” said senior researcher Stephen Elledge. He is an investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Md., and professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School in Boston. “You could get sick again from the same viruses you previously were immune to.”
This immune system “reset” also hampers the body’s ability to create antibodies against disease, meaning that new infections are likely to hit harder than before, according to a second team of researchers whose findings appear in the November issue of Science Immunology.
Both studies take their data from a 2013 measles outbreak in the Netherlands.
READ MORE: Causes of measles
Families in communities with low vaccination rates agreed to provide blood samples, allowing researchers to observe the effects of a measles infection on non-vaccinated people.
Previous studies had suggested that the effects of measles might persist long after infection, suppressing the immune system, Elledge said. But no one knew why that might be.
Analysis of blood from 77 unvaccinated Dutch children found that the virus eliminated between 11% and 73% of their antibodies, Elledge’s team found. Antibodies are the cells that remember past encounters with pathogens and help the body avoid repeat infections.
“People had known that a lot of these immune cells get infected during measles, but they had no idea how much damage was being done,” Elledge said.
Antibodies dropping
The more severe a child’s infection, the more it damaged their immune system, the researchers found.
“Those antibodies dropped precipitously. They went away very quickly,” Elledge said. “This was really surprising. Nobody expected it to happen that quickly, because these kids had only been infected seven weeks ago.”
The second team of researchers performed genetic sequencing on antibody genes from 26 Dutch children, before and then 40 to 50 days after their measles infection.
The investigators confirmed the loss of specific immune memory cells that had been built up against other diseases and had been present in the children’s blood prior to measles.
READ MORE: Vaccines in your doctors fridge may be useless
But the analysis also showed that the immune system had been reset to an immature state that could produce only a limited repertoire of antibodies, hampering the body’s ability to respond to new infections.
Follow-up animal research showed that measles reduced the level of flu antibodies in ferrets that had been vaccinated against influenza, the report said.
The ferrets were then more susceptible to contracting the flu when exposed to influenza virus, and their symptoms were more severe, the findings showed.
Very important secondary impact
Dr. Amesh Adalja is a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore. He pointed out that “one of the misconceptions of measles that often fuels vaccine hesitancy is that it is a benign childhood illness. However, that is far from the case. Not only does measles directly cause hospitalisations, pneumonias, brain infections and deaths, it also has a very important secondary impact.”
These new studies “underscore the clear and present danger the re-emergence of measles around the world represents and the incalculable value of the measles vaccine,” Adalja added.
The immune system still works after a measles infection, but it has to learn all over again how to protect the body, Elledge said.
He recommended that people vaccinated against other diseases who contract the measles should consider getting another round of shots.
These findings reinforce the importance of vaccination against measles, Elledge said.
“We did look at kids who’d been vaccinated with the MMR [measles, mumps, rubella] vaccine, and we did not see the same problems,” he said. “The measles virus is much nastier than we realized, and that makes the vaccine that much more valuable.”
Image credit: iStock
Exploring Beyond the Cage
I just read an interesting BBC article about why there are significantly more vegan women than men, which is mostly summarized by this statement at the top:
When women hold two incompatible beliefs, they’re more likely to change their behaviour to reconcile them. Men, by comparison, tend to dig themselves in.
The article cites a variety of studies that delve into gender differences and how these connect with dietary decisions. Reading it had an odd effect on me, making my vegan side feel good and my male side feel primitive and stupid.
While I do consider myself an ethical vegan today, this article reminded me that I didn’t go vegan for reasons of compassion or concern for the well-being of animals. While I was aware of factory farming and the cruel ways that animals were treated, that argument didn’t move me. I used to be one of those guys who’d hear those points and then want to eat a burger afterwards. I’m not proud of that, but it’s the truth.
I don’t think it was because I wanted to snub my nose at people trying to tell me what to do. It didn’t feel like I was trying to assert dominance either. I think it had a lot more to do with being out of touch with my feelings. I simply didn’t feel much compassion for animals. Either my heart was silent on the issue, or my brain couldn’t detect what my heart was saying.
I could know that animals were suffering, but this awareness remained on an intellectual level. It didn’t trigger any meaningful caring or compassion within me. I was more likely to think something like, “Sucks to be them, but oh well.” Watching animals in pain was almost like watching a balloon being popped. Animals were just objects, and their fate was of little consequence.
What ultimately got me to transition to veganism was curiosity, but more specifically it was about risk reduction. A prior personal growth experience made me aware of one of my blind spots, and this made me more open-minded about exploring and investigating other potential blind spots.
That prior blind spot was religion. I was raised within the bubble of Catholicism throughout my childhood, and I came to see it very differently when I was 17 years old. I left the Church behind and began exploring other points of view, which was massively transformational. That was one of the most growth-oriented times of my life. It sure took a lot of courage though. I had no help when I began leaning in that direction, so it was a very lonely path with plenty of resistance from other people. I really had to trust my intelligence and reasoning to get through it.
When I looked back on my religious upbringing after I transitioned away from it, I could see more clearly just how blind I was and how full of holes my previous beliefs and perspectives had been. For example, since atheists didn’t worship God, they were doomed to suffer for all eternity. And so when I eventually met an atheist boy, I wasn’t really sure how to relate to him. How exactly do you play sports with someone who’s doomed? Is it safe to be on the same team together? What if he touched me – was being doomed infectious, like cooties?
At first I felt sorry for the guy. He was older than me but obviously in a lot of trouble. I found it odd that he didn’t feel sorry for himself though. I’d assumed that a doomed boy should be more messed up. He seemed totally fine and normal for a boy his age, even nicer than most. That situation created a cognitive disconnect.
When I learned about vegetarianism and veganism some years later, part of me recognized that this could be another of those situations where the insider and outsider perspectives are very different. I realized that if I only explored one side, I’d never really understand the other side, and there was a very real risk that I could be stuck in another thought bubble. That meant that if I didn’t try the opposite for at least a short time, like a month or so, I could potentially be doing the equivalent of remaining Catholic for life without ever understanding what a non-Catholic perspective was like. I shuddered at the thought.
I saw this as an enormous risk, one that I couldn’t ignore. The risk that I might inadvertently do the equivalent of spending my whole life Catholic really bothered me. What if the diet I was raised to eat was another one of those areas where I’d be wrong and deluded all along? I had to find out if that was true or not.
Once I adopted this framing, it was pretty much inevitable that I’d eventually do some personal exploration in this direction. It was just a matter of figuring out when and how to fit this experiment into my life. I started with a 30-day vegetarian trial between semesters in college in 1993. And then 3.5 years later, I did a 30-day vegan trial in January 1997. Both of those experiments became permanent lifestyle changes.
Again, compassion wasn’t one of my reasons for doing these experiments. I was much more concerned about the risk of getting stuck for life in a potentially erroneous thought bubble. The huge differences between the inside and outside perspectives of Catholicism were still fresh in my mind, even though I didn’t begin these diet experiments till about 5 years after the transition from religion.
My memories of the prior transition were frequently refreshed – whenever I’d pass a church, see a church on TV, or interact with family. Even seeing Ned Flanders or Reverend Lovejoy on The Simpsons was a reminder of the trap I’d successfully escaped – and a powerful warning that I could still be trapped inside another bubble.
So for me this exploration wasn’t really about getting into vegetarianism and veganism. It was about exploring outside of the reality bubble of animal products. I absolutely needed to know what was outside of that bubble. Not discovering the truth for myself was too great a risk.
I had learned the hard lesson that I couldn’t trust the people around me. When I was surrounded by religious people, we were all inside the same thought bubble together. It was only when I spotted a window to an outside world – in the form of meeting a nice doomed boy – that I began to wonder if I might be missing something.
So truth poked my bubble. Don’t you just hate it when that happens?
I wasn’t at all sure what the exterior perspective would be like though. When I did my 30-day vegetarian trial, it really was just a trial. I had no expectation that it would stick. I assumed it was just going to be a temporary experiment and that I’d be back to eating animals on Day 31. My intention was to explore and experience vegetarianism, so I would finally know what it was like. But I didn’t actually want it to stick. I wanted to open the door to answer truth’s knock, hear the sales pitch, and then say, “No, thank you,” and close the door like I was dismissing a couple of Mormons on a mission. I wanted to reassure myself that it was fine to return to my old diet since I had checked to see what life was like outside that bubble. I wanted to make sure that my dietary thought bubble was okay and that I didn’t have to abandon it.
Of course my assumption was wrong. It took perhaps six months to realize that I wasn’t going to return to eating animals. With the 30-day vegan trial, it didn’t take as long. If I recall correctly, I felt that I’d continue with veganism even before the initial 30-days were up. The first week of seeing all that dairy clog purging itself from my body helped to convince me that I should never put that gunk back inside me again.
These days I care a lot about animals. I feel for them in ways I never felt when I ate their flesh and eggs and drank the milk intended for their babies. My relationship with animals used to be one of entitlement and indifference, and I didn’t see anything wrong with that. I didn’t feel what I feel today. These feelings simply didn’t exist in the old bubble.
Going vegetarian and then vegan really helped to clean and revitalize my heart-brain connection, but I had no idea that I was missing anything when I started exploring in this direction. I gained a sense of empathy and compassion that I couldn’t remember feeling previously, except maybe in some vague memories from when I was very young.
Reading that article about the stubbornness of men hit home with me because it reminded me of what I was like in the old bubble. I feel so grateful that somehow I found an intellectual backdoor that enabled me to escape it. While I went vegan as an experiment to address a potential risk, I remain vegan for a much stronger set of reasons. I’m no longer indifferent and emotionally out of touch like I used to be. My ability to treat animals as products was an artifact of a thought bubble I left behind a long time ago. While I was in that bubble, I couldn’t connect with their beauty.
I spent many years of my life inside a thought bubble of animal neglect and abuse. While it’s not one I’ve visited for many years, I remember well enough what it was like on the inside. From the inside it doesn’t look like abuse. It just seems normal. I can recall plenty of meals with friends back in the day where animals were part of the experience, and it didn’t seem strange at the time.
I can also see why many men aren’t persuaded to explore veganism by the compassion argument. I understand how some pro-vegan arguments could make some men want to do the opposite. I don’t really think this attitude has so much to do with asserting dominance over animals though. I think it’s really a form of clinginess to the familiar thought bubble. It’s a retreat from a perceived threat. The response is more fear-based than many men would care to admit. It’s a retreat from a potential truth.
What convinced me to explore beyond the bubble was that I recognized a potentially greater threat – that I could be stuck inside a very limiting subset of reality that could trap me for life if I was too passive. The only way to know if I was indeed trapped was to explore beyond the cage. I had to know what was outside. And when I saw that life was better outside, I saw the cage for the trap it was, and I never wanted to return to it again, just as I never wanted to return to my old religious cage again.
Veganism isn’t a restrictive form of eating or lifestyle. It’s entirely the opposite of that. It’s immensely freeing to live outside of the old cage. This path helped me develop senses that I didn’t know I could possess. It invited me on a tremendous journey of upgrading my relationships with animals, with people, with life, and with reality.
The experience of escaping the old bubble was similar to realizing that I never had to go to confession again – no more sharing my sins with a creepy collared guy. My old relationship with animals was creepy as hell. But like the creepiness of confession, I couldn’t see or acknowledge that creepiness from within the bubble. Such is the nature of a thought bubble – you can only see the full truth of it when you experience the inside and the outside for enough time, and then compare notes.
This makes me wonder what kind of framing could have sped me along and helped me progress faster when I was younger. If the compassion argument would have fallen on deaf ears, what argument might have influenced me to explore outside my bubble sooner?
I think there is a better argument that would have worked, and it’s largely what I shared here. You could call it the Bubble Boy frame.
I was developing a healthy respect for people who explored beyond the bubbles that I grew up with. Once I had popped my first major bubble, I gained a much weightier understanding of the risks of not even seeing a bubble in which I could potentially be trapped for life. Considering that I could still be going to mass every Sunday – and confession too – if I hadn’t seen the bubble for what it was is creepy as hell.
That’s still a convincing argument for me today. This perspective has nudged me to explore outside of other bubbles that I was raised with – the bubble of employment, the bubble of monogamy, and so on.
The desire to discover new truths is compelling, but even more compelling is the desire to avoid spending your whole life in a cage and never even seeing the cage.
So I think I’d have found the perspectives of the cage, the bubble, and the trap a lot more compelling than any compassion-based arguments. Those lenses got me moving even when my heart-brain connection was offline. I didn’t want to spend my life as a bubble boy or cage boy.
These days those perspectives aren’t as compelling as they used to be. They still feel relevant and meaningful sometimes, but I now find it simpler to trust my default heart-brain intelligence instead of needing to lean on the bubble boy crutch for guidance. I am super grateful that I came upon that crutch when I did though. It was an empowering perspective – not the only tool in the toolbox but certainly an effective one for escaping nearly invisible cages.
Children facing uncertain future, experts warn
The World Health Organization says “radical change” is needed before it is too late
Western diet rich in fat and sugar linked to skin inflammation
A Western diet rich in fat and sugar may lead to inflammatory skin diseases such as psoriasis, a study by UC Davis Health researchers has found.
The study, published today in Journal of Investigative Dermatology, suggests that dietary components, rather than obesity itself, may lead to skin inflammation and the development of psoriasis. A common and chronic skin disease, psoriasis causes skin cells to form scales and red patches that are itchy and sometimes painful.
Diet and Skin Inflammation
Previous studies have shown that obesity is a risk factor for the development or worsening of psoriasis. The Western diet, characterized by a high dietary intake of saturated fats and sucrose and low intake of fiber, has been linked to the increased prevalence of obesity in the world.
“In our study, we found that short-term exposure to Western diet is able to induce psoriasis before significant body weight gain,” said Sam T. Hwang, professor and chair of dermatology at UC Davis and senior author on the study.
For the UC Davis Health study, which used a mouse model, Hwang and his colleagues found that a diet containing both high fat and high sugar (mimicking the Western diet in human) was required to induce observable skin inflammation. In four weeks only, mice on Western diet had significantly increased ear swelling and visible dermatitis compared to mice fed a controlled diet and those on high fat diet alone.
“Eating an unhealthy diet does not affect your waistline alone, but your skin immunity too,” said Zhenrui Shi, visiting assistant researcher in UC Davis Department of Dermatology and lead author on the study.
Bile Acids and Skin Inflammation
The study detailed the mechanisms by which inflammation happens following a Western diet. It identified bile acids as key signaling molecules in the regulation of skin immunity. Bile acids are produced in the liver from cholesterol and metabolized in the intestine by the gut microbiota. They play an important role in dietary lipid absorption and cholesterol balance in the blood.
The study found that cholestyramine, a drug used to lower cholesterol levels by binding to bile acids in the intestine, helped reduce the risk of skin inflammation. The finding suggests that bile acids mediate the development of psoriasis. The binding of cholestyramine to bile acids in the gut and its subsequent release through the stool allows for lowering of skin inflammation.
Further studies are needed to understand the mechanism behind diet-induced skin inflammation and the interaction between metabolism, microbes and immunity.
This study was supported by a National Psoriasis Foundation Discovery Grant, an NIH/NIAMS R01 grant (1R01AR063091-01A1) and an NCI/NIH grant (U01-CA179582-03A1).
Other collaborators include Xuesong Wu, Mindy Huynh and Mimi Nguyen from Department of Dermatology at UC Davis, Prasant Jena and Yui-Jui Yvonne Wan from Medical Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at UC Davis and Sebastian Yu from Department of Dermatology at Kaohsiung Medical University.
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Materials provided by University of California – Davis Health. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Wall Street investors react to climate change
Climate change is being felt in a corner of the world different from where one might expect: Wall Street, where some of the biggest investors are starting to take action.
That’s the finding of a first-ever survey of institutional investors conducted in part by the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin. From banks and insurers to pension and mutual funds, 97% of 439 respondents believe global temperatures are rising. More than half say climate risks are already a factor in their investment decisions, according to “The Importance of Climate Risks for Institutional Investors” published in the March 2020 issue of The Review of Financial Studies.
“These investors have accepted that climate change is happening,” said Laura Starks, finance professor at Texas McCombs, who designed the survey with colleagues Philipp Krüger of the University of Geneva and Zacharias Sautner of the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management. “They’re trying to come to terms with how it’s going to affect the risk and return of their portfolios.”
The survey also reveals how institutions are starting to act. Their tactics range from asking companies to catalog carbon emissions to backing shareholder resolutions. If institutions are not satisfied with executives’ responses, a few are divesting their shares.
Such measures are only the beginning, the survey suggests. Within five years, fully 91% expect climate risks to be financially material to their investments.
Of executives who filled out the survey, 31% were C-level. Forty-eight percent of the 439 respondents managed more than $100 billion in assets. Institutions’ responses paint a mixed picture of how important they consider climate risks. Only 10% rank it as their top concern, compared with standard financial and operating risks. But three kinds of climate risks are rapidly rising in urgency:
- The risk of new regulations is already having financial consequences for 55% of respondents.
- Within two years, 66% fear physical impacts on their assets from extreme weather, rising sea levels or wildfires.
- Within five years, 78% expect technological effects, as greener technologies unseat carbon-burning ones.
“The Paris accord means that different countries are going to have to start regulating carbon emissions more,” Starks said. “The industry, as a whole, is just in the early stages of tackling this issue.”
How do institutional investors feel they can shield themselves? For many, the first step is to assess the problem. Thirty-eight percent are analyzing the carbon footprints of the securities they own, while 24% consider climate risks when screening new investments.
The next step is to talk with corporate managers. While 43% of institutional investors have discussed climate risks in general, 32% have proposed specific actions to shrink carbon footprints.
Respondents aren’t always happy with companies’ responses. Thirty percent have submitted shareholder proposals such as a successful 2017 resolution that asked Exxon Mobil to disclose how climate risks would affect the company in the future.
A fifth have taken more drastic steps such as publicly criticizing management, taking legal action, or the ultimate punishment: selling off shares.
But for most, it’s enough to put executives on notice. “A company becomes more aware of what’s in their carbon footprint, because someone is watching,” Starks said.
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Materials provided by University of Texas at Austin. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
