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Climate variability can strongly influence species evolution and survival via environmental niche adaptation and selection. This Review outlines the methods of modelling past climate variations and their impact on human evolution.
Decarbonization strategies can perturb the nitrogen cycle through elevating nitrogen inputs to the environment, potentially driving increased eutrophication. This Review explores the potential synergistic and antagonistic impacts on carbon and nitrogen emissions from five major decarbonization strategies.
Since 2001, the IPCC has utilized ‘burning embers’ to visualize risk at different levels of anthropogenic warming. An ethnoclimatological approach offers an opportunity to expand these figures, aligning the assessment of risk with the lived realities of vulnerable populations.
The cold-adapted communities on the seafloor around Antarctica are vulnerable to environmental changes. This Review summarizes the regional variations in present and future benthic ecological changes driven by the impacts of climate change and acidification.
Quantifying progress towards sustainability goals in food systems requires a universal, threshold-based Food Sustainability Index. Integrating artificial intelligence, remote sensing and empirical observations with system dynamics modelling can help guide sustainable transformations.
Harmful algal blooms degrade inland aquatic ecosystems and pose a risk to water security. This Review explores the underlying drivers of hotspots and global trends in harmful algal blooms, and identifies potential solutions for bloom monitoring and mitigation.
To explore career opportunities outside of academia, Nature Reviews Earth & Environment interviewed Tom Pickerell about their career path from PhD student to Global Director of the Ocean Program at the World Resources Institute (WRI).
Mine tailings are voluminous and often toxic wastes, whose management is a global safety and sustainability challenge. This Review summarizes the major tailings storage facility disasters and impacts, emphasizing the urgent need for risk reduction approaches for management and policy.
The Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) exerts strong control on the Indo-Pacific climate. This Review outlines twenty-first-century changes in the IOD, noting robust increases in eastern pole sea surface temperature variability, more frequent strong and early positive IOD events, and less frequent moderate positive IOD events.
Geosciences are one of the least gender-diverse fields, with women representing ~33% and ~39% of those employed in the USA and UK, respectively. Institutionalized and incentivized culturally responsive mentorship through establishment of career investors offers an accelerated path toward transforming geoscience culture and leadership.
Engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) have numerous environmental applications, such as in water treatment and reuse. This Review explores the trade-offs between the risks and benefits of environmental ENMs, and highlights that the environmental and health risks of ENMs are relatively low when used responsibly.
To explore career opportunities outside of academia, Nature Reviews Earth & Environment interviewed Graeme Poole about their career path from postdoctoral researcher to Planetary Protection Officer at Airbus Defence and Space.
The future of the land carbon sink depends on the temperature response of ecosystem respiration. This Review explores observational and experimental evidence for a unimodal temperature response of respiration and the implications for carbon sequestration predictions.
The switch to a low-carbon economy is heavily reliant on mining, geothermal energy and geological storage. Subsurface geoscientists are critically needed to responsibly source, manage and refine these operations while minimizing environmental and social impacts.
