Extreme rainfall events, amplified by climate change, can stress public health, but efforts to assess health impacts have been fragmented so far. A study now analyses the relation between extreme rainfall and mortality from respiratory diseases across urban environments in East Asia.

Understanding the forces behind the successful governance of common-pool resources is crucial to sustainable development. This study reveals the importance of establishing and enforcing ‘access rights’ in the face of intergroup conflicts over resources to facilitate the evolution of sustainable ‘use rights’.

Picturing positive changes resulting from greener transport policies can be more effective than trying to shift climate beliefs, often related to party affiliations. A study shows how AI pictures of future car-free cities enhanced Americans’ willingness to support more sustainable transport policies.

Using decades of high-resolution mapping, this study tracks the land area of the wildland–urban interface that is exposed to fire risk, finding increases in both area and risk in multiple locations globally.

Rice is a staple crop for much of the world’s population, but its production can be a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. Supplemental nano iron oxides application can halve these emissions while boosting crop yield.

Carbon neutrality complicates the transition to sustainability due to potential adverse effects on employment and the prosperity of high-emitting sectors. This study simulated the Hungarian economy and tested various strategies for reducing CO₂ emissions, revealing that decarbonization-induced economic and job losses can be substantially limited by considering the firm-level network of supply chains.

Cement is a ubiquitous material in modern construction, but produces substantial carbon emissions. Emerging technologies exist that can reduce cement’s carbon footprint, but the right strategies must be implemented ambitiously and synergistically to be effective.

The energy sector has led to the creation of marine artificial structures such as oil and gas installations and offshore wind farms. This global meta-analysis assesses whether such structures can act as artificial reefs and benefit the marine environment when left at sea following decommissioning.

Evaluating the sustainability impacts of housing policies for low- and moderate-income households is challenging. This study links observations of housing programme participation and utility consumption to quantify the benefits of locally administered housing policies in a typical community in the American Southeast.

This work shows an integrated device that could harvest osmosis energy at one side and then drive efficient production of green hydrogen from seawater at the other side.

Deep-sea mining could provide a substantial supply of metals that we urgently need to decarbonize our society, yet its environmental impact remains intractable. Considering on-land resources remain abundant and can be extracted using well-established risk management, deep-sea mining cannot currently be justified.

A powerful technique with broad applications, operando X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) is widely used but there is a lack of design and reporting standards. Focusing on water-splitting electrocatalysts, we propose best practices for the reproducibility, replicability and reliability of operando XAS studies.

To get the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) back on track we need to reshape our approaches to implementation, including localization. Localization done differently involves progressing beyond symbolic piecemeal efforts, prioritizing the SDGs with the greatest gains, and pluralizing interpretations and pathways for actions.

As our reach extends outside our planet into Earth’s orbital space and beyond, the need for proactive research and equitable governance of human activity in outer space is more urgent than ever.

The rapid launch of hundreds of thousands of satellites into low Earth orbit will significantly alter our view of the sky and raise concerns about the sustainability of Earth’s orbital space. A new framework for sustainable space development must balance technological advancement, protection of space environments and our capacity to explore the Universe.