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The Millennium Development Goal target 7c, to halve the proportion of the global population without access to safe drinking water by 2015, is the first international drinking water target ever met. Understanding how this was achieved is critical to replicating success.
Ming Hung Wong of the Southern University of Science and Technology, China, leads an international team investigating e-waste recycling impacts, and chaired the Waste Management Sub-Committee in the Hong Kong Advisory Council on the Environment.
Protected areas, such as parks and marine reserves, are a vital conservation tools. A new study models the trade-offs between using limited resources for acquiring new protected areas and managing existing ones.
Urgent action is needed to ensure food security and mitigate climate change. Through a multi-model comparison exercise, this study shows the potential negative trade-offs between food security and climate change mitigation if mitigation policies are carelessly designed.
The challenges of meeting food, water and energy needs are interconnected, requiring integrated assessments of land use, socioeconomic policies and climate change. This study assesses the required increases in water, trade and agricultural land needed to double food production by 2050.
Addressing sustainability challenges requires attention to the material basis of society. This Perspective illustrates how a Systems Thinking in Chemistry Education framework could help to integrate knowledge about the molecular world with the sustainability of Earth and societal systems.
Rural communities manage much of the world’s forests, but the effects on both landscapes and people are still unclear. This study estimates the impacts of such community-based forest management in Nepal from 2000–2012 and finds significant net reductions in both deforestation and poverty.
Madagascar’s recently elected president ran on a platform of improving the economy and raising people out of poverty. We suggest that addressing the precipitous decline of biodiversity will help to deliver this commitment, and we lay out ways in which President Rajoelina could firmly put the country on a trajectory towards sustainable growth.
Groundwater influences biophysical processes behind key ecosystem services. This study finds that many ecosystem service indicators respond nonlinearly when the water table is within a critical depth, with the potential for large effects in areas with shallow groundwater.
Although climate warming after the 1950s is clear in many studies, records suggest an earlier onset to industrial impacts. This study combines observational data with simulations and finds a weakening of temperature seasonality, attributable to human influence, over the Northern Hemisphere since the late nineteenth century.
Millennium and sustainability goals may be well known, but the history of how those goals are formed remains hidden. This Analysis examines the political and academic factors that led to MDG 7C and how China and India have tried to achieve it.
Modelling the network of power plants that supply a given city, and the amount of energy drawn from each plant, shows a city’s energy mix and demonstrates which other cities it shares most energy suppliers with.
Protected areas are vital for conserving biodiversity, but limited funds must be allocated between acquiring new areas and managing existing ones. Using a landscape model, this study finds that management is often the better first investment and is always a necessary complement to acquisition.
