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Choosing how much to take and how much to preserve from our environment is a challenging task, and every small decision counts. A behavioural experiment sheds new light on how time pressure negatively affects sustainability decisions.

Societal activities carry environmental costs, which can be mitigated to restore ecosystem function and services. A meta-analysis demonstrates strong negative effects of coal mining on stream biota and limited recovery after restoration.

Droughts and water shortages have threatened urban centres before, but Cape Town captured the world’s attention to the spectre of a full-scale shutdown. The lessons to be learned go beyond precipitation modelling to institutional organization, technological infrastructure, and social behaviour, and every world city should prepare before it’s too late.

Coal is an important energy source, but its use affects regional air quality and global climate. This study finds that coal mining reduces the diversity and number of stream animals and that these impacts persist after mine reclamation efforts.

Despite recent technological progress, providing safe, clean and sufficient water sustainably for all remains challenging. This Review assesses the potential applications of nanomaterials in advancing the sustainability of water treatment systems, and their associated barriers.

Using experimental behavioural methods, this study shows that time pressure leads to worse decisions over the sustainable management of collectively held natural resources.

Freshwater resources sustain ecosystems and societies, so reliable monitoring is critical. This study finds that streamgaging data reporting has declined worldwide since 1979, and that variation in monitoring threatens many US river basins.

A network experiment in a major environmental NGO finds that the diffusion of innovation is four times more likely when information regarding novel practices is targeted to staff members who participate in a greater number, and a more diverse set, of projects.

An analysis of dietary changes in China and their environmental impact between 1997 and 2011 reveals distinct trends between rural and urban areas, and an overall increase in greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption and land appropriation, driven mainly by the increase of meat consumption.

Professor Anu Ramaswami of the Advisory Committee on Environmental Research and Education discusses their newly published report about the next generation of sustainable urban systems science with Nature Sustainability.

Current global models omit the complex, unpredictable behaviours that socio-environmental systems exhibit. Now researchers have proposed a city- and trade-based integrated model that includes these behaviours and explained its use for food and water security research.

Giving economic compensation in exchange for securing ecosystem services has gained traction in recent decades. However, debates about the efficacy and ethics of payments abound. To help ensure the effectiveness of these schemes, more care is needed in monitoring environmental outcomes and penalising non-compliance.

A unique dataset of over 550 programmes of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) worldwide, grouped into water, forest- and land-use carbon, and biodiversity programmes, is used to assess the trends and the current status of such policy instruments.

A curated global dataset of Payments for Environmental Services (PES) reveals that theoretical principles are only partially applied in practice, particularly conditionality, which makes payments underperform.

A framed field experiment in five countries shows that Payments for Ecosystem Services increase forest conservation, that communication contributes to payment effectiveness and that positive effects outlast payments.