Environmental sciences articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    In the U.S. today nearly no surface waters are drinkable without treatment. Here, the authors demonstrate that four-fifths of cities that withdraw surface water are supplying water that includes a portion of treated wastewater, concentrated in the Midwest, the South, and Texas.

    • Sean W. D. Turner
    • , Jennie S. Rice
    •  & Landon Marston

  • Article
    | Open Access

    An isotope synthesis of 1257 global lakes revealed on average 20% of inflow is lost to evaporation, but 10% of Earth’s lakes show extreme evaporative losses. Stable water isotope monitoring is an effective way to detect comparative climatic and catchment-scale impacts on lake water-balance budgets.

    • Yuliya Vystavna
    • , Astrid Harjung
    •  & Leonard I. Wassenaar

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Increasing rice yield while improving resource use efficiency is of great importance. This study examines cropping systems globally to highlight areas where rice production can be improved by prioritizing R&D strategies.

    • Shen Yuan
    • , Bruce A. Linquist
    •  & Patricio Grassini

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Deforestation and drainage have made Indonesian peatlands susceptible to burning. Here the authors find that Indonesia’s 2015 fires resulted in economic losses totaling US$28 billion, while the area burned and emissions released could have been significantly reduced had restoration been completed.

    • L. Kiely
    • , D. V. Spracklen
    •  & H. A. Adrianto

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The degree to which wildfire activity in Australia is affected by climate change is not well quantified. Here, the authors show that the frequency of forest fires and the area burned have increased significantly over recent decades, mainly due to an increase in dangerous fire weather conditions through warmer temperature and circulation changes.

    • Josep G. Canadell
    • , C. P. (Mick) Meyer
    •  & Vanessa Haverd

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Brazil is a wildfire-prone region, and few studies have investigated the health impacts of wildfire exposure. Here, the authors show that wildfire waves are associated with an increase of 23% in respiratory hospital admissions and an increase of 21% in circulatory hospital admissions in Brazil.

    • Weeberb J. Requia
    • , Heresh Amini
    •  & Joel D. Schwartz

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Nearly one-third of the global coastline is vegetated. Incorporating these vegetation belts in coastal protection strategies would result in more sustainable and financially-attractive designs to mitigate the impacts of extreme coastal storms.

    • Vincent T. M. van Zelst
    • , Jasper T. Dijkstra
    •  & Mindert B. de Vries

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The implications of delaying carbon dioxide removal (CDR) are poorly understood. Here the authors highlight the potential extra costs and reduced removal potential of delayed CDR action, with a special focus on direct air capture and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (DACCS and BECCS).

    • Ángel Galán-Martín
    • , Daniel Vázquez
    •  & Gonzalo Guillén-Gosálbez

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Knowing how individual water molecules interact with surfaces is crucial for understanding surface and interface phenomena. Here, the authors show how local water-water interactions enable an unforeseen and surprisingly rapid mechanism of atom exchange between a common mineral and its surroundings.

    • Zdenek Jakub
    • , Matthias Meier
    •  & Gareth S. Parkinson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ammonia emissions from agricultural sources can cause severe health impacts. Here, the authors show that about 25% of global agricultural ammonia emissions in 2012 were related to international exported goods and caused 61 thousand PM2.5 related premature deaths, which points out large ammonia mitigation potential in international trade.

    • Rong Ma
    • , Ke Li
    •  & Jing Meng

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Flash droughts can have devastating impacts but are notoriously difficult to predict. This study identifies global hotspots of flash drought, driven by evaporative demand and precipitation deficits across varying geographic regions and crop-type, providing a framework for flash drought prediction.

    • Jordan I. Christian
    • , Jeffrey B. Basara
    •  & Robb M. Randall

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How structurally complex interfaces mediate bubble bursting might significantly impact environmental and industrial processes. Here, authors investigate the bubble-bursting jets dynamics of oil-covered aqueous surface and show how these can also disperse insoluble organic contaminants.

    • Bingqiang Ji
    • , Zhengyu Yang
    •  & Jie Feng

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Accurate assessments of ice-sheet runoff are essential for sea-level projections. A new method using satellite altimeter observations can provide near real-time surface mass balance measurements across an entire ice sheet and reveal runoff variability not captured by global climate models.

    • Thomas Slater
    • , Andrew Shepherd
    •  & Kate Briggs

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The emplacement of the Karoo LIP occurred synchronously with the Toarcian crisis, which is characterized by negative carbon isotope excursions. Here the authors use carbon cycle modelling to show that thermogenic carbon released during LIP emplacement represents a plausible source for the negative excursions.

    • Thea H. Heimdal
    • , Yves Goddéris
    •  & Henrik H. Svensen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Satellite-derived chlorophyll data and Google Earth Engine (GEE) are used to introduce the first global map of coastal eutrophication potential as a GEE app. The prospects of the app being used as a global framework for eutrophication screening/monitoring are discussed.

    • Elígio de Raús Maúre
    • , Genki Terauchi
    •  & Michael DeWitt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Building construction causes large material-related emissions which present a serious decarbonization challenge. Here, the authors show that the building material sector could halve emissions by increasing efficiency until 2060 but even then its emissions would be twice as high as needed to meet the 1.5 °C target.

    • Xiaoyang Zhong
    • , Mingming Hu
    •  & Paul Behrens

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Much effort is invested in calibrating model parameters for accurate outputs, but established methods can be inefficient and generic. By learning from big dataset, a new differentiable framework for model parameterization outperforms state-of-the-art methods, produce more physically-coherent results, using a fraction of the training data, computational power, and time. The method promotes a deep integration of machine learning with process-based geoscientific models.

    • Wen-Ping Tsai
    • , Dapeng Feng
    •  & Chaopeng Shen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Rivers are increasingly plagued by “syndromes”, i.e. salinization, mineralization, desalinization, acidification, alkalization, hardening and softening. A global look at river biogeochemistry reveals dramatically increased flux estimates and anthropogenic drivers of syndromes.

    • Jiang Wu
    • , Nan Xu
    •  & Jinren Ni

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Perovskite photovoltaics has become more competitive against silicon counterpart in reducing cost of solar energy, yet the management of toxic lead hampers it application. Here, the authors propose a cost-effective environmental-friendly approach to recycle lead and transparent conductors.

    • Bo Chen
    • , Chengbin Fei
    •  & Jinsong Huang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The Antarctic ozone hole has had far-reaching impacts, but effects on geochemical cycles in polar regions is still unknown. Iodine records from the interior of Antarctica provide evidence for human alteration of the natural geochemical cycle of this essential element.

    • Andrea Spolaor
    • , François Burgay
    •  & Alfonso Saiz-Lopez

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Sea spray aerosol (SSA) are an important way through which oceans can influence the atmosphere’s radiative properties. Here, the authors present measurements taken over a 42,000 km ship cruise in the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean and show that SSA number concentrations vary over a 24-hour cycle, possibly linked to surface water bubble-bursting dynamics.

    • J. Michel Flores
    • , Guillaume Bourdin
    •  & Ilan Koren

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Nowhere is biomass burning more abundant than on the African continent, but the biogeochemical impacts on forests are poorly understood. Here the authors show that biomass burning leads to high phosphorus deposition in the Congo basin, which scales with forest age as a result of increasing canopy complexity.

    • Marijn Bauters
    • , Travis W. Drake
    •  & Pascal Boeckx

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Accurate seasonal forecasts of sea ice are highly valuable, particularly in the context of sea ice loss due to global warming. A new machine learning tool for sea ice forecasting offers a substantial increase in accuracy over current physics-based dynamical model predictions.

    • Tom R. Andersson
    • , J. Scott Hosking
    •  & Emily Shuckburgh

  • Article
    | Open Access

    N2 fixation was key to the expansion of life on Earth, but which organisms fixed N2 and if Mo-nitrogenase was functional in the low Mo early ocean is unknown. Here, the authors show that purple sulfur bacteria fix N2 using Mo-nitrogenase in a Proterozoic ocean analogue, despite low Mo conditions.

    • Miriam Philippi
    • , Katharina Kitzinger
    •  & Marcel M. M. Kuypers

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Methane emissions from oil and gas systems are underestimated in official inventories. Here the authors synthesize thousands of field measurements and develop an inventory-based model for a better understanding of why this underestimation exists and how it can be fixed.

    • Jeffrey S. Rutherford
    • , Evan D. Sherwin
    •  & Adam R. Brandt

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Outdoor air pollution contributes to millions of deaths worldwide yet air pollution has differential exposures across racial/ethnic groups and socioeconomic status. While green infrastructure has the potential to decrease air pollution and provide other benefits to human health, vegetation alone cannot resolve health disparities related to air pollution injustice. We discuss how unequal access to green infrastructure can limit air quality improvements for marginalized communities and provide strategies to move forward.

    • Viniece Jennings
    • , Colleen E. Reid
    •  & Christina H. Fuller

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This paper quantifies global urban water scarcity in 2016 and 2050 and explores potential solutions. One third to nearly half of the global urban population is projected to face water scarcity problems.

    • Chunyang He
    • , Zhifeng Liu
    •  & Brett A. Bryan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The global water demands of irrigated agriculture are estimated through country surveys or through hydrological models, but both approaches are taxing. Here, the authors show that they can simply be estimated as a function of irrigated areas.

    • Arnald Puy
    • , Emanuele Borgonovo
    •  & Andrea Saltelli

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Plastics are major marine pollutants, and while research suggests that they can release potential harmful additives into seawater, how environmental conditions influence this is unknown. Here the authors determine that byproducts released from microplastics are less under deep-sea conditions versus surface.

    • Vincent Fauvelle
    • , Marc Garel
    •  & Richard Sempéré

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Lead toxicity poses a big hurdle for the commercialization of perovskite optoelectronics, hence reducing the environmental impact holds the answer for its future application. To tackle this challenge, the authors utilize germanium to reduce the lead content, enabling highly luminescent eco-friendly compound for LEDs.

    • Dexin Yang
    • , Guoling Zhang
    •  & Dawei Di

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Freshwater salinisation is a growing water quality problem, but impacts and drivers across regional to global scales have been lacking. A new assessment of inter-regional freshwater salinisation demonstrates the importance of irrigation as a driver of salinisation.

    • Josefin Thorslund
    • , Marc F. P. Bierkens
    •  & Michelle T. H. van Vliet

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Microbes that colonise ice sheet surfaces are important to the carbon cycle, but their biomass and transport remains unquantified. Here, the authors reveal substantial microbial carbon fluxes across Greenland’s ice surface, in quantities that may sustain subglacial heterotrophs and fuel methanogenesis.

    • T. D. L. Irvine-Fynn
    • , A. Edwards
    •  & A. Hubbard

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Conserving mangrove biodiversity has numerous co-benefits, including climate change-mitigation. Here the authors demonstrate that blue carbon storage in mangroves can be best sustained by combining site-specific dominant species with other species with contrasting functional traits.

    • Md Mizanur Rahman
    • , Martin Zimmer
    •  & Ming Xu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Afforestation is an important greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation strategy but the efficacy of commercial (harvested) forestry is disputed. Here the authors apply dynamic life cycle assessment to show that new commercial conifer forests can achieve up to 269% more GHG mitigation than semi-natural forests, over 100 years.

    • Eilidh J. Forster
    • , John R. Healey
    •  & David Styles

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Aviation contributes to climate change and ways to reduce its emissions are widely debated. Here, the authors assess the effects of technology improvements and the use of sustainable aviation fuels and find that even when these are considered aviation is unlikely to meet emissions goals in line with the Paris Agreement.

    • Volker Grewe
    • , Arvind Gangoli Rao
    •  & Katrin Dahlmann

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