Water quality trading (WQT) is a popular policy for improving the quality of waterways across the United States by reducing water pollution. However, in established markets, few trades are happening, making environmental gains from WQT limited. Despite these trends, policy makers continue to implement this market‐based approach to achieve clean water. Successful markets rely on stakeholders' willingness to buy and sell in the market, yet research has not focused on this aspect of WQT. The stakeholders involved in WQT are frequently farmers (as sellers) trading with developers and urban municipalities (as buyers). To better understand stakeholder decisions about WQT, this research sought to document barriers and catalysts for farmers participation in a brand‐new WQT program in the Jordan Lake Watershed, North Carolina. Key findings from interviews with ninety farmers show that most have high conservation rates and know about local water problems. Nevertheless, they were unwilling or unlikely to participate in the program. We offer detailed evidence of the complex ways farmers calculate risk for farm practices and environmental health as an indication that their perceptions of risk and moral sensibilities involve a broader set of costs and values than accounted for in the WQT policy design, ultimately making trading unviable.

Over half of lakes, reservoirs, and ponds in the United States are threatened or impaired, mostly by nutrients. One policy to improve water quality is water quality trading (WQT). While the concept is appealing, adoption of conservation practices in these programs has been anemic at best. Using a case study in the newly-formed WQT market in Jordan Lake, North Carolina, we propose that part of the problem is a large adoption premium (AP) for this program. AP is the amount that farmers require over and above direct adoption costs to participate. In this study, farmers were asked at in-person interviews about their willingness to accept (WTA) a payment to adopt a particular conservation practice (riparian buffers) in order to generate and sell credits. We compared farmers' WTA to their direct cost of participation, which allowed us to estimate an AP. On average, the AP more than doubles the cost of purchasing credits. The AP sums all of the known indirect costs already cited in the literature, and more, into a single value and is relatively simple to estimate. Knowing the AP would improve the ability of policy makers to accurately estimate what is needed to boost adoption rates in WQT programs and other conservation programs as well.

To identify elements of crisis response that might hold lessons for resilience beyond the current moment, we studied a central North Carolina food system during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Based on ethnographic interviews with farmers, employees and volunteers of food access organizations, and local government employees, our work found that connection, networking, innovation, and technology adoption were sources of strength and growth. Lessons: food system actors found that their social connections helped them to exchange information and resources, meet increased food needs among SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) participants and Latina/os immigrants, and combine efforts to adopt technologies and learn from new labor pools. Challenges: while navigating COVID‐19, food system actors faced challenges spanning labor, safety, information, government policies, supply shortages, weather, and unreliable information. In addition to lessons and challenges, we offer a series of future research directions that we identified in our study findings. Our study shows that small‐scale production and local food organization and government responses are important and dynamic parts of a resilient food system. Regional systems’ actors were able to pivot more quickly than large‐scale systems and presented a more flexible, locally suitable model that will likely prove adaptive beyond the pandemic.

Academic-practitioner divides in disaster management and research can be persistent and pernicious, bearing consequences for disaster survivors and future affected populations. The gap between disaster professionals and academic researchers is often treated as an unavoidable structural problem or a neutral accident of professional silos and circumstance. We suggest that these gaps are not neutral, and that they can and must be overcome. With hundreds of millions of people affected by disaster each year and recovery costs skyrocketing, there is urgency in connecting researcher and practitioner knowledges to avoid expensive mistakes and most importantly, to decrease human suffering. Yet the difficulties that US academic anthropologists and practitioners experienced in their efforts to collaborate became evident in a cross-sector National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded workshop on the relevance of culture in disaster work. We suggest and illustrate how more systematic cross-field communication can be operationalized through engaging in an ongoing and relational process of bridging. Such a process can offer long-term benefits to the people and institutions involved, dramatically enhance the science of disaster management, and help reduce the social and material costs of disaster impacts.Keywords Academic and practitioner divide Á Applied research Á Cross-sector communication Á Culture and disaster Á Disaster anthropology Á Disaster management

Conjugated copolymers containing electron donor and acceptor units in their main chain have emerged as promising materials for organic electronic devices due to their tunable optoelectronic properties.