News & Views in 2021

The potential lithium crisis and supply shortages of other metals essential for lithium-ion batteries have driven innovation in alternative technologies. Now a study describes high-performance potassium-ion batteries that can cycle for more than 500 days with negligible performance loss.

Both lithium- and sodium-ion batteries could play an important role in combating climate change, but they often suffer structural instabilities in the cathodes, which degrade performance. Now a study on two cathode materials that function in either battery type sheds light on how their structure should be designed to suppress these instabilities.

Zinc batteries are more sustainable than the currently dominating lithium technologies, but their major technical problems have yet to be fully resolved. Now a new electrolyte formulation addresses most issues and delivers rechargeable zinc batteries with both performance breakthrough and cost advantage.

Social capital, embedded in people’s relationships, is important for practically all domains of life. Individuals need others to safeguard and enhance their living conditions. A study now shows that social capital helps in the recovery from a natural disaster.

Oceanic uranium represents a vast fuel resource that could ensure the long-term sustainability of nuclear power. A new study seeks to harness that potential by developing a bioinspired adsorbent membrane capable of capturing uranium from seawater.

Sustainable farming of fish requires their feed to be responsibly sourced. New research illustrates how we could convert industrial carbon emissions into a valuable feed resource.

Whether payments for ecosystem services (PES) are effective and how they change the motivations of land and resource users in the long-term is still controversial. A study of a program in Ecuador provides encouraging results regarding what happens if payments stop.

Doubling food productivity in smallholder farms — a major goal to achieve global food security, according to the United Nations — may come with additional nutrient needs. A new study reports that some regions will require almost 40% more phosphorus between 2015 and 2030 to meet this objective.

Historical and future trends in sustainability performance show that the world’s countries have substantially overshot their fair share of most planetary boundaries, without proportional social achievements.

With rising fossil fuel consumption and ongoing land cover change, humanity is burning through its remaining carbon budget. Recent work puts a ‘Do not disturb’ sign on biospheric carbon we can’t afford to lose.

Degraded land is being restored along an 8,000 km stretch across Sahelian countries. A new analysis reveals promising economic returns from recent projects and informs the targeting of strategies for newly pledged funds.

China’s food demand is projected to grow and reshape its production and trade relations. A new study evaluates the consequent challenges for agricultural land, greenhouse gas emissions, fertilizer and irrigation water use in China and its trading partners.

Our understanding of the impacts of oil spills highlights the urgency of preventing them. A new study considers public health and other effects of an oil spill from an abandoned Red Sea tanker.

Integrated assessment models are widely used to assess climate change mitigation strategies. Comparing scenarios from several integrated assessment models, a study now highlights the benefits and trade-offs of near-term mitigation to reduce mitigation challenges in the longer term.

Sustainability and resilience are priorities in agriculture. A new analysis of four experiments with a combined 46 years of data shows that intercropping — growing multiple crops together — can increase yields, yield stability and soil fertility.

Tree planting is often proposed as part of the solution to climate change. A new study demonstrates why it is critical to see this as a social science issue, not just an ecological one.

Wise management of ecosystem services merits considering their changes over time, but current practices are based on static maps. A new study highlights the importance of studying forest ecosystem service dynamics.

Changing social and biophysical dynamics, as well as data limitations, in the Kivu Rift in Eastern Africa make it difficult to plan for landslide risk. A study of historical remote sensing data identifies in detail the factors impacting the evolution of this risk.

Cooking with solid fuels is a major source of early death and ill health among lower-income Indians. The same group also suffers disproportionately from air pollution generated by other, more general sources.

Electroreduction of carbon dioxide is an enabling technology that can produce valuable chemicals, notably C₁ (for example, formic acid and carbon monoxide) and C₂ chemicals (for example, ethylene and ethanol), with a minimal or even negative carbon footprint. Now, a techno-economic analysis shows that only the C₁ products can achieve competitive prices, while substantial improvements in process economics are needed for C₂.