Articles in 2018

Global environmental change complicates the goal of securing adequate nutrition for a growing world population. This study assesses the per capita availability of food nutrients for various scenarios to the year 2050. Results suggest that economic growth will expand food and macronutrient access more than climate change will suppress it, but that micronutrient inadequacies will plague some regions.

Human diets strongly affect prospects for relative sustainability, affecting health, land, water, biodiversity and livelihoods. This study finds that select ‘future foods’, including insects, seaweed and cultured meat, provide major environmental benefits compared with current animal-source foods while safeguarding key micronutrients essential for human health.

Solar desalination is an attractive alternative to energy-intensive conventional seawater desalination. In this study, the authors present a completely passive, multi-stage and low-cost distiller using layers of membranes to achieve a distillate flow rate of almost 3 l m^–2 h^–1.

A provision of the Forest Act in Brazil could legalize deforestation of an additional 6.5–15 million ha of private lands, under a plausible scenario of protected public land reaching 65% in some states.

Sustainability depends on the resilience of natural, social and engineered systems. This theoretical study quantifies resilience to repeated disturbances, synthesizing understanding of how the sizes of shocks, or ‘kicks’, and recovery, or ‘flows’, contribute to maintaining systems in desirable states.

An ecological evaluation of the largest community-based conservation initiative along the Amazon river also shows significant benefits for non-targeted species. This 40-year-old project targets the giant South American turtle.

Assessing electricity consumption in green-certified buildings using high-frequency hourly data shows that such buildings reduce energy demand particularly during peak times, which has additional environmental and economic benefits.

Human and animal faeces simultaneously threaten global health and provide resources for recovery. This study presents the first global-scale analysis of recoverable faeces from 2003 projected to 2030 and of associated burdens. Production from domestic animals is about four times that of humans, emphasizing the need for better onsite management.

China’s coal-dominated power system is a source of carbon emissions, local air pollution and water stress. This study presents three power system development scenarios that run until 2030 in China, where coal strategies are optimized under current environmental regulations and varying prices for air pollutant emissions and water.

Wet biowaste from food processing and animal manure can be converted into biocrude oil using HTL. In this study, the authors combined distillation and esterification to upgrade biocrude into diesel blendstock and performed engine tests using it.

This study spatially maps the economic value of some major ecosystem services provided by the Brazilian Amazon. It also estimates changes in these values under scenarios of degradation and low-impact logging.

Biofuels, produced from grass, algae and other organisms alive today, supplement fuels produced through geological processes. This study finds that moderate intensification of prairie perennial plants can optimize benefits of the resultant biofuels, including soil carbon, greenhouse gas benefits and fuel production.

Village chickens are commonplace among smallholder communities, but mortality is high. This study compares two regions in Ethiopia and finds that unique adaptations, including traits and parasite burdens, reflect distinct gene pools likely shaped by human-driven selection. Results suggest sustainable interventions for village chickens should be locally tailored.

Most wildlife lives outside protected areas, creating potential conflicts with humans. This study assesses potential trade-offs between wildlife and livestock management in an East African savanna, finding potential ecological and economic benefits from integrating the two.

Machine learning using big data can enhance environmental law monitoring. Applied to the US Clean Water Act, such methods can help public agencies to increase the likelihood of inspecting non-compliant facilities up to sevenfold.

High-yield farming systems have the potential to spare non-farmed land for other uses (such as nature conservation), but raise concerns about their other environmental impacts (such as greenhouse gas emissions and soil erosion). This study argues such impacts should be measured per unit of production and shows that viewed this way, some land-efficient systems have less impact than lower-yielding alternatives.

Designing interventions to address water scarcity under climate change is challenging given the large uncertainties in projected water availability. In this study, changes in the uncertainty range of anticipated water scarcity conditions are identified, and a general decision-making framework to support policy decisions is developed.

Poaching undermines the effectiveness of marine protected areas, where enforcement capacity is limited. In this study, fishers adjacent to MPAs were surveyed, and it was found that about half had observed poaching, but that most do not react so as to avoid conflict, or because they feel that this is either not their responsibility or that poaching is a survival strategy.

Cognitive mapping reveals how people think about complex systems and enables hypothesis tests on understanding interdependency. This study finds that education and experience are associated with more nuanced form of complex-systems thinking in sustainable agriculture, such as feedback loops and indirect effects.

Most nutrients in human excreta, if recovered, could offset substantial quantities of synthetic fertilizer use globally and advance food security goals by enhancing circular economies. This study analyses co-location of urban nutrients with nearby agricultural needs in 56 of the world’s largest cities and finds that in locations with high cropland density, nutrient-intensive crops and compact urban area, it would be possible and convenient to reuse human-derived nutrients in agriculture.