Brief Communications

An increasingly warm climate can lead to more intense, frequent and longer periods of hazardous heat, increasing the risk of heat-related health concerns. This study assesses whether incarcerated people in the United States are potentially disproportionately exposed to such hazardous heat conditions.

Picturing positive changes resulting from greener transport policies can be more effective than trying to shift climate beliefs, often related to party affiliations. A study shows how AI pictures of future car-free cities enhanced Americans’ willingness to support more sustainable transport policies.

Efforts to protect and conserve the planet’s land and oceans should also guarantee that people can access them equitably. Comparing marine and terrestrial protected areas in the United States, a study shows different access patterns based on income and race.

Biodiversity protection indicators are important to assess progress towards sustainable development goals. Using mountain ecosystems as an example, this study compared two biodiversity protection reporting metrics varying in their underlying methods and applied at different spatial scales.

Environmental impact assessments are often blamed for delays in resource management, but this analysis finds that EIAs contribute a small fraction of time to implement forest management relative to other parts of the process.

Restoring forests is a policy priority globally, but often, little attention is paid to the type of forest being restored, which matters for biodiversity and livelihoods. Using a map of forest management types, this study assessed the extent of managed forests in recent tree-cover gains globally.

The idea that technology and green growth strategies can sufficiently decouple economic growth from associated environmental impacts has both supporters and opposers. This study presents the views of climate policy researchers from 73 countries on different growth models, including green growth, agrowth and degrowth.

Failing to keep the increase of global mean temperature below 1.5 °C will have multiple negative implications. A study maps the annual changes in cooling demand, showing the most affected countries by warming, if the global mean temperature rises from 1.5 °C to 2.0 °C

This study shows how a form of olfactory misinformation (odour camouflage) on a newly sown wheat crop can prevent wild house mice from finding buried seeds, substantially reducing seed loss in an ethical way.

The US Inflation Reduction Act sets that in 2027, for an electric vehicle to be tax-credit eligible, 80% of the market value of critical minerals in its battery must be sourced domestically, from US free-trade partners or from North American recycling. The viability of the target is evaluated for different battery chemistries.

Coral reefs, with their colourful biodiversity, are icons of nature tourism. Leveraging social media data, this study finds that live reefs attract tourists, supporting local conservation, but that such tourism harms especially the healthiest reefs.

Systems that combine agriculture and aquaculture have the potential to intensify food production relatively sustainably. This study shows how models of such co-culture systems based on ecological networks can optimize production based on the species involved.

Accurate models of pro-environmental behaviour can inform interventions to foster sustainability. This study estimates the extent to which psychological factors like attitudes and personal norms explain greenhouse gas emissions from clothing purchasing across four countries.

Deforestation caused by oil palm plantations is threatening biomass carbon sequestration across the tropics. Although large-scale plantations dominate this expansion, smallholder operations responding to high export prices are preferentially eating into mature, carbon-rich forests that promise high yields.

Sand for building material is a vital but increasingly scarce resource. Demand for sand is projected to increase substantially in the coming decades, particularly in lower-income countries. Strategic modifications to building practices, however, can reduce global building sand demand by up to 50%.

Forest conservation contributes to climate change mitigation and delivers a host of other benefits to society, but such benefits are usually assessed qualitatively at the project level. This study provides a quantitative assessment of multiple benefits from forest carbon projects across Southeast Asia.

Perovskite solar cells are an emerging energy technology but their sustainability is jeopardized by the presence of Pb. Here the authors introduce on-device layers that could capture over 99.9% of leaked Pb.

Not all meat sources have equal climate and environmental impacts, leading to hopes that fish and chicken could ‘displace’ red meat. However, this analysis of five decades of international data casts doubt that such a substitution effect is happening, and that instead all meat consumption is rising.

Shifting global food production to plant-based diets by 2050 can sequester 99–163% of the CO₂ emissions budget towards limiting climate warming to 1.5 °C.

Accurate estimates of emissions distribution in a vehicle fleet can help air pollution control. With diesel emissions data from chassis dynamometer tests and on-road remote sensing, this study shows that previous results about a skewed distribution towards the highest 10% emitters may not be correct.