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Academic enterprises seeking to support society’s efforts to achieve global sustainability need to change their legacy reward systems. We need new structures to foster knowledge that is deeply integrated across disciplines and co-produced with non-academic stakeholders.

At the global scale, indigenous lands are critical for biodiversity conservation and cultural survival. Yet at local, sub-national and national scales both are often threatened.

The implementation of technologic solutions to complex problems can have unintended effects. This study questions the water sustainability of using shade balls in the Los Angeles reservoir to reduce evaporation during the recent drought in California, by assessing the shade balls’ water footprint.

The rapid growth of bottled water use in low- and middle-income countries, and its normalization as a daily source of drinking water, does not provide a pathway to universal access. Generous and sustained investment in centralized and community utilities remains the most viable means for achieving safe water access for all.

Land management and ownership by Indigenous Peoples are critical components of conservation strategies, but information on these has previously never been aggregated. Here, global data is compiled to show that Indigenous Peoples have tenure rights or manage a quarter of the world’s land area and 40% of all protected areas and intact ecosystems.

A shift away from fossil fuel subsidies to carbon pricing could generate revenues to finance progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals. This Perspective shows that in many low-income countries, as private sources of finance are limited, revenues from carbon taxes could be a particularly attractive policy option for financing the SDGs.

Most of the sustainability challenges and opportunities associated with urbanization are found in the global south. This Perspective shows the extent to which urban issues differ between the developed and developing worlds and identifies steps to re-focus the urban research system globally in view of allowing a more prominent role of urban scholarship from the global south.

Organic farming produces crops without using synthetic agrochemicals, but its success with pests is unclear. This study finds that organic farming promotes overall pest control but that varies by pest type, with lower pathogen pests, similar animal pests and higher weed pests than conventional agriculture.

Three decades of increasing temperature were expected to cause cod stocks to decline in the North Sea and Gulf of Maine, but they increased in the North Sea and declined in the Gulf of Maine. These trends are due to changes in fishing pressure rather than climate change.

Too much fertiliser in agriculture affects rivers and oceans at large scale. But it turns out that a surprising variety of non-food products is also to blame for impacts on water bodies worldwide.

Societal commitment to protect our seas has never been higher, but it will not succeed unless coordination across the various regulatory bodies involved is achieved.

Experts have long debated how to help poor, predominantly rural nations meet global development goals. One of the most anticipated, and debated, ventures, the Millennium Villages Project, has just published a retrospective self-evaluation mostly supporting the effectiveness of their multi-sectoral approach.

As agriculture is the primary driver of eutrophication resulting from the oversupply of nitrogen and phosphorus to water bodies, much attention has been paid to the environmental impacts of food consumption. Little is known about the impacts of consuming other goods. This study shows that in 2011 the final demand for non-food products accounted for over one-third of the global marine and freshwater eutrophication impacts—a 28% increase since 2000.

Aquaculture is surpassing wild-caught seafood, but we feed aquaculture with wild forage fish for key nutrients. This study finds removing such forage fish from diets of livestock and non-carnivorous aquaculture species and moderating its use in China will help sustain forage fish populations in the future.