The Republic of South Africa is a parliamentary republic with three-tier system of government and an independent judiciary, operating in a parliamentary system. Legislative authority is held by the Parliament of South Africa.Executive authority is vested in the President of South Africa who is head of state and head of government, and his Cabinet.The President is elected by the Parliament to serve a fixed term.South Africa's government differs greatly from those of other Commonwealth nations. The national, provincial and local levels of government all have legislative and executive authority in their own spheres, and are defined in the South African Constitution as "distinctive, interdependent and interrelated".Operating at both national and provincial levels ("spheres") are advisory bodies drawn from South Africa's traditional leaders. It is a stated intention in the Constitution that the country be run on a system of co-operative governance.The national government is composed of three inter-connected branches:All bodies of the South African government are subject to the rule of the Constitution, which is the Supreme law in South Africa..
Engaging children with nature can promote their pro-environmental behaviors (PEBs). However, few studies have examined how this relationship functions across parental communication patterns and children's developmental stages, particularly in China. This study examines the relationship between parental engagement in children's nature interactions and children's PEBs, and how this relationship varies by parental environmental discussions and grade level. Drawing on Granular Interaction Thinking Theory (GITT), we analyzed data from 516 child-caregiver pairs across five Chinese cities. We found that parental facilitation of children's nature interactions is positively associated with their PEBs, and that this positive association improves in magnitude as the frequency of environmental discussions with parents increases. Children's grade level moderates this relationship, suggesting developmental variability in how nature-based experiences translate into environmental actions. Accordingly, family engagement and deliberate educational programs can nurture children's environmental values, gradually transforming toward sustainability and an eco-surplus culture.
Background: There is increasing focus on developing resilient engineering students, this being linked to the perceived difficulty of degrees and the rate of technological change. Simultaneously, there continue to be issues with diversity and retention, and concerns regarding student mental health, both of which have been linked to resilience. Despite this, beliefs that engineering students hold about resilience and what it means to be resilient remain largely unexamined. Purpose/Hypothesis: We explore the role of underlying structures and contextual factors in shaping engineering students' perceptions and experience of resilience within engineering education and practice. Design/Method: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 23 engineering students in a UK-based institution. Transcripts were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis (RTA). Results: Students recognized resilience as important within engineering education and practice, but highlighted the detrimental impact that a focus on resilience can have on mental health. Whether resilience was necessary, as well as what constituted a resilient response, appeared to vary depending on the situation and required some level of judgment. Students appeared to believe that the university environment provided the adversity required to develop resilience but played a less significant role in providing the support necessary for positive adaptation. Conclusions: This work acts to surface implications of situating resilience as a desirable student or graduate attribute without consideration for wider structural inequalities. Failing to expose assumptions regarding the situations which require a resilient response risks further perpetuating the very issues around diversity, retention, and progression, which the development of resilience has been proposed to overcome.
Abstract The Asian summer monsoon establishes a strong connection between near-surface pollution in Southeast Asia and the global atmosphere by linking local emission sources with the large-scale circulation. There is a strong impact on the extratropical lower stratosphere, which is thought to occur mainly via quasi-horizontal export of polluted and moist air from the upper-level Asian monsoon anticyclone (AMA). The recent Probing High Latitude Export of Air from the Asian Summer Monsoon (PHILEAS) campaign focused on investigating this eddy transport and the associated mixing of monsoon-influenced air into the extratropical lower stratosphere through dedicated High Altitude and Long-Range Aircraft (HALO) observations from Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany, and Anchorage, Alaska, in the late summer and early autumn 2023. We summarize the mission’s motivation and objectives, place the Asian monsoon season 2023 into a climatological context, and present some representative observations. The observations during flights from Oberpfaffenhofen demonstrate the significant spatial and temporal AMA variability, which allowed HALO to investigate the displaced lower AMA boundary over the eastern Mediterranean, Israel, and Jordan. The observations during flights from Anchorage highlight the influence of long-range transport of moist and polluted air from the region of the Asian summer monsoon on the composition of the extratropical upper troposphere and lower stratosphere (UTLS), which impacts both ozone chemistry and the climate-relevant radiation budget. Significance Statement This study examines the Asian summer monsoon’s role in linking Southeast Asia’s near-surface atmosphere to the global upper troposphere and lower stratosphere. We find that the Asian summer monsoon plays a key role in transporting moisture, aerosols, and pollutants (including very-short-lived chlorinated compounds) to high-latitude regions. This, in turn, impacts atmospheric chemistry including stratospheric ozone depletion and alters the climate-relevant atmospheric radiation budget. Additionally, long-range transport of aerosols, such as ammonium nitrate, has the potential to influence cloud formation, further affecting climate and weather patterns.
The savanna habitats often harbour abundant and species-rich bat communities. Whether they represent mere ad hoc assemblages of incidentally co-occurring forms or distinct entities integrated by locally specific adaptations and balanced resource partitionings is largely unknown, as are the natural drivers shaping community variation at different spatial scales. An extensive dataset (130,888 acoustic bat records from 31 acoustic parataxa) was collected in 60 plots across Kruger National Park (KNP), South Africa; the plots were located (i) at perennial rivers, (ii) at seasonal rivers, and (iii) on dry crests away from any water source. Besides the effect of water availability, distance to campsites, and microgeographic variation on bat community richness and structure, we found (i) extensive homogeneity in community structure at local, subregional, and regional scales contrasting to a mosaic from between-plot variation, (ii) absence of robust effects of environmental biotic and abiotic predictors on the distribution of individual acoustic parataxa and community variation, (iii) nearly identical pattern of habitat preferences in all community members approaching the centroid of KNP habitat variation, and (iv) an exceptionally high degree of community nestedness. These results suggest that the bat community of the KNP savanna biome represents a single entity consistently integrated with a network of coexistence relations that probably arose locally during a long savanna history.
The Benguela upwelling system (BUS) exhibits strong seasonal variability in dissolved oxygen ([O 2 ]), driven by upwelling and remotely advected water masses, and primary productivity. In contrast, its interannual variability remains poorly understood due to limited long-term observations. In this study, we applied an interpretable machine learning (ML) approach to investigate the interannual variability of surface [O 2 ] in the BUS, highlighting a deoxygenation trend. This trend is driven by widespread warming which reduces [O 2 ] solubility in the adjacent South Atlantic basin, along with interannual variability in upwelling water masses and declining coastal primary productivity. Conversely, an oxygenation trend is observed off Lüderitz, attributed to perennial upwelling that sustains primary productivity throughout the year. The deoxygenation trend in the BUS is significant and may intensify low-[O 2 ] events, highlighting the need for improved monitoring and assessment of impacts on marine ecosystems.
