Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 24th Aug 2026, 01:52:51am WEST
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Daily Overview |
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Biodiversity 1 Location: B002 Session Chair: Guyo Godana Dureti, University of Bonn | |
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Campaigning for Extinction: Eradication of Sparrows and the Great Famine in China 1: University of Chicago, United States of America; 2: Fudan University, China; 3: Shanghai University, China; 4: University of Hong Kong, China How do large disruptions to ecosystems affect human well-being? This paper tests the long‐standing hypothesis that China's 1958 Four Pests Campaign, which exterminated sparrows despite scientists’ warnings about their pest‐control role, exacerbated the Great Famine—the largest in human history. Combining newly digitized data on historical agricultural productivity in China with habitat suitability modeling methods in ecology, we find that, after sparrow eradication, a one‐standard‐deviation increase in sparrow suitability led to 5.3% larger rice and 8.7% larger wheat declines. State food procurement exacerbated these losses, resulting in a 9.6% higher mortality in high‐suitability counties—implying nearly two million excess deaths. | |