Page - 5 - in options, Volume summer 2021

News in brief CLOSING THE GLOBAL SKILLS GAP SUPPORTING CHINA’S CARBON NEUTRALITY GOALS While developing countries are rapidly catching up in terms of formal educational attainment, the gap between highly skilled and low skilled populations continues to widen globally. A new demographically consistent indicator for adult literacy skills – the Skills in Literacy Adjusted Mean Years of Schooling (SLAMYS) – will help to determine the differences in the skills of the working- age population between countries and over time, and how this relates to educational attainment in the respective country and year. www.iiasa.ac.at/news/21-skills IIASA researchers contributed to a new report that provides an overall picture of the pathways that support China’s carbon neutrality goal and its new vision for growth and development, and identifies both long-term sectoral strategies and near-term actions to prepare the help the country realize its goal of achieving carbon neutrality before 2060. www.iiasa.ac.at/news/20-carbon-China How grasslands changed our climate Grasslands are critically important for animal forage, biodiversity, and ecosystem services. They absorb and release carbon dioxide (CO2), and emit methane (CH4) from grazing livestock and nitrous oxide (N2O) from soils, especially when manure or mineral fertilizers are introduced. Little is however known about how the fluxes of these three greenhouse gases from managed and natural grasslands have contributed to climate change in the past, and about the role of managed pastures versus natural or very sparsely grazed grasslands. To address this knowledge gap, an international research team built and applied a new spatially explicit global grassland model - one of the first to simulate the regional details of land use change and degradation from livestock overload. The team found that emissions of CH4 and N2O from grasslands increased by a factor of 2.5 since 1750 due to increased emissions from livestock. The ability of grasslands to absorb more carbon and pack it in the soil, was estimated to have intensified over the last century, but mainly over sparsely grazed and natural grasslands. On the other hand, over the last decade, grasslands intensively managed by humans have become a net source of greenhouse gas emissions. “Our findings make it clear that countries should assess not only the greenhouse gas budgets of their managed pastures, but also the sinks and sources of sparsely grazed rangelands, steppes, tundra, and wild grasslands. Full greenhouse gas reporting for each country could facilitate the assessment of progress towards the goals of the Paris Agreement and better link national greenhouse gas budgets to the observed growth rates of emissions in the atmosphere,” concludes Jinfeng Chang who led the study at IIASA and is now based at Zhejiang University in China. Jinfeng Chang: changj@iiasa.ac.at Further info: pure.iiasa.ac.at/16976 ADDRESSING INEQUALITIES TO WEATHER THE IMPACTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE Vulnerability and exposure to the effects of climate change differs significantly across social groups, defined not only by income levels but also by gender, education, and racial and ethnic profiles. According to a recent study, building capacity to adapt to such changes will require eradicating inequalities of many sorts, including gender, to improve overall resilience to climate change impacts. www.iiasa.ac.at/news/20-women 5Optionswww.iiasa.ac.at Summer 2021