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Agricultural fertilizer use is widely acknowledged to be a leading cause of water pollution. Yet, no national estimates exist on the effect of fertilizer application on concentrations of agricultural pollutants in US watersheds. This paper employs a watershed-level panel data on nitrogen and phosphorus pollution readings to examine the impact of fertilizer use on US water quality over a fifty-five-year time period from 1951 to 2005. Findings show that a 10% increase in the use of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers leads to a 1.52% increase in the concentration of nitrogen and a 1.37% increase in the concentration of phosphorus across watersheds. Results also indicate that there exists heterogeneity in nutrient pollution elasticity estimates across eighteen US water resource regions, ranging from 0.082 to 0.733 in the case of nitrogen and from 0.036 to 0.475 in the case of phosphorus. Combining our results with prior hydrology-based studies, we find that a 100% increase in the use of nitrogen fertilizers in the Lower Mississippi water resource region expands the size of the hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico by roughly 3,389 square miles, equivalent to about two-fifths of the estimated size of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

Highlights COVID-19 resulted in a 4.54% decrease in the number of human-induced forest fires in Nepal. Fire radiative power associated with forest fire events decreased by 11.36% in Nepal. Restrictions on movement of people across districts in response to the pandemic likely played a role. The analysis used satellite data on real-time active fire locations from Nepal.

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Rationale The outbreak of the 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has induced a considerable degree of fear, emotional stress and anxiety among individuals around the world. Objective The objective of this study is to evaluate the relationship between COVID-19 virus cases per 1000 residents and mental health outcomes of individuals across the globe. Methods Using plausibly exogenous variation in daily country-level reports of new COVID-19 cases across the world, this study employs an individual-by-day global data set to assess the association between virus outbreak intensity and short-term measures of mental health outcomes. Results Results indicate that females are 20.02% (95 % CI [6.65 %, 33.39 %]) more likely than males to find life depressing, suggesting that they may bear a much larger mental health burden than males during the COVID-19 pandemic. The association between the pandemic and mental health is more pronounced among individuals staying at home for the past week, who are 14.81 % (95 % CI [3.46 %, 26.16 %]) more likely to feel anxious and 11.17 % (95 % CI [2.13 %, 20.21 %]) more likely to experience emotional instability than their counterparts. The association between virus outbreak intensity and the likelihood of anxiety among individuals staying at home increases with household size, ranging from 11.73 % (95 % CI [-4.65 %, 28.11 %]) among individuals with 0–1 members in the household to 21.02 % (95 % CI [5.73 %, 36.31 %]) among those with 4–8 members in the household. Conclusion These short-run estimates of mental health damages associated with COVID-19 imply that welfare losses from pandemics among individuals are enormous across the globe.

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