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Understanding the role of biodiversity in maintaining the provision of Nature’s Contributions to People is critical to sustainability. This study finds a substantial contribution of high-biodiversity areas to the regulation of air quality, climate and freshwater quantity, with important implications for conservation efforts.
Understanding the drivers of forest losses and their economic implications is key to designing efficient climate policies. This study simulates market-driven land-use decisions to identify the factors contributing to forest losses, revealing such losses, their trends, temporal variation and social value.
The Rotterdam Convention helps ensure that international trade of harmful chemicals is transparent, and it gives parties the right to refuse imports of specific substances. Now a study shows that illegal trade of chemicals listed under the Rotterdam Convention is ongoing alongside legal trade.
The Rotterdam Convention addresses the international trade of hazardous chemicals, but its effectiveness is rarely evaluated. This study analyses international trade flows of highly hazardous chemicals covered by the Convention, revealing that large-scale illegal trade continues to have disastrous impacts.
Changes in driving behaviour could offer solutions to reducing transport emissions. Classification of driver aggressiveness based on vehicle trajectory data is used to estimate transport emissions associated with differences in car-following behaviour in China from 2013 to 2050. This analysis reveals that a trend towards more aggressive driving could increase transport emissions.
Radiative cooling is a technology that dissipates excessive heat without energy input and could address critical sustainability issues. However, the lack of transparency and standardization for reporting of radiative cooling performance risks misgauging the true merits of reported breakthroughs. This Comment discusses the common pitfalls in performance measurement and recommends the best practices for future endeavour in favour of practical applications.
Primary human exposure to large wildfires more than doubled in the contiguous United States from 2000 to 2019, largely occurring in the western United States. This increase is attributable to an increase in the burned area, as well as to wildfires impacting more people and infrastructure per unit burned area, particularly in California.
The authors deploy a hydrotropic solubilization strategy turning an otherwise poorly water-soluble acetate into a salt for a high-concentration aqueous electrolyte that features low cost and environmental sustainability and enables good performance of zinc batteries.
Exposure to wildfires is increasing across the continental United States. These risks are growing not only for populations living at the wildland–urban interface but also for critical infrastructure, such as roads and transmission lines.
While the type of vehicles matters a great deal for the quantity of emissions being generated, driver behaviour is also a major factor. This paper uses driving trajectory data to project how much carbon in the atmosphere could be prevented through calm driving through 2050.
Nitrogen requirements and usage vary across maize, wheat and rice systems in Ethiopia, Malawi and India. Analysis of these systems indicates that targeted nutrient management strategies could increase the efficiency of nitrogen usage, helping to address fertilizer shortages and reduce the negative environmental impacts of excess nitrogen.
Energy efficient brick production is crucial for the carbon footprint, especially in countries with a continuously expanding built environment. This study models Indian brick production and reveals a large underreporting in official energy consumption estimates, as well as key drivers affecting its performance.
Where to invest to help transform current livestock systems towards sustainability and climate resilience is currently unclear. This study identifies priority locations for investments supporting climate change adaptation and mitigation across 132 low- and middle-income countries, at mid- and low latitudes.
Fertilizer supply is highly sensitive to international disruptions. Geospatially differentiated strategies, including integrated inorganic and organic management to N-deficient regions, can bolster global food security
Global aquatic foods are a key source of nutrition, but how their production is influenced by anthropogenic environmental changes is not well known. The vulnerability of global blue food systems to main environmental stressors and the related spatial impacts across blue food nations are now quantified.
The upcycling of plastic wastes to realize plastics circularity is obstructed by the presence of chlorine impurities. Now a conversion strategy addresses this problem and paves the way to upcycle chlorine-contaminated plastic wastes.
In the ongoing cost-of-living crisis, voters’ support for environmental protection seems to be dropping, even though we need it now more than ever before.
Adopting ‘climate-smart’ agricultural practices that increase the amount of carbon stored in soils can make an important contribution to climate change mitigation. But if crop productivity suffers as a result, other farmers may compensate by expanding cropland elsewhere, which could offset some carbon savings.
Whether or not marine protected areas (MPAs) deliver positive outcomes for both people and nature remains a challenging question. Using a statistical matching approach, this study provides quantitative evidence of co-benefits for fish and people associated with MPAs in the Mesoamerican region.
