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While global efforts to tackle hunger and other food-related crises are stepping up, Nature Sustainability and the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability convene a new Expert Panel focusing on system changes and human agency.
A convening of leading international sustainability experts met for the first time in Potsdam, Germany, in March 2019 to re-think sustainability primarily as a societal challenge. Ortwin Renn and Solène Droy from the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies tell Nature Sustainability about the initiative.
Urbanization and economic development fuel demand for sand, used for concrete. This study finds that sediment loads are insufficient to replace the sand mined from the Mekong River delta, with mining rates high enough to make river banks unstable.
Natural resource management involves complex relationships that are affected by data and knowledge limitations. Mental modelling can harness the wisdom of a crowd of stakeholders.
Double cropping can increase production from a given area of land. This study finds that maize ethanol produced from a second crop with soybeans in west central Brazil can reduce greenhouse gas emissions compared with gasoline and also have economic and employment benefits.
Life cycle assessment (LCA) can be used to quantify the environmental sustainability performance of products. This Perspective analyses LCA studies of commercialized biochemicals produced through microbial fermentation to highlight gaps in coverage of environmental impacts and life cycle stages.
Advances in remote sensing have helped to understand the human drivers of land-use change globally, but have neglected the role of illicit transactions. This Perspective presents a framework to identify illicit land transactions, and an approach to link them to land uses using remotely sensed data.
The recent shift in the United States from coal to natural gas for electric power has reduced the carbon dioxide emissions intensity of electric power production, but the other pollution-related impacts of this shift are not yet known. This study finds that, between 2005 and 2016, decommissioning coal-fired plants in the continental US saved an estimated 26,610 lives and 570 million bushels of corn, soybeans and wheat in their vicinities and also changed regional climate.
An international arrangement of transferable fishing rights and biomass-based allocation can incentivize establishing Marine Protected Areas while promoting the economy.
By passively evaporating water from waste streams, evaporation ponds work with different waste streams but need large areas due to low evaporation rates. This study shows that a photo-thermal device converting sunlight into mid-infrared radiation could enhance evaporation and reduce land needs.
