News & Views in 2019

The Sustainable Development Goals elegantly capture humanity’s shared aspirations, but it’s at the national level where the rubber hits the road. Progress is possible across multiple goals but challenges to comprehensive achievement remain.

Phosphorus recovery is as important for closing the phosphorus cycle as its discovery 350 years ago was for food production. A new analysis highlights costs and benefits of creating value from the wastes generated by our food systems and modern lifestyles.

Lack of good-quality monitoring and evaluation data is a key barrier to large-scale uptake of agriculture interventions. Data from low-cost microsatellites have a strong potential to bridge this gap and promote sustainable intensification targets.

Fisheries conservation requires restricting access to countries’ exclusive economic zones (EEZs), which is costly to monitor and enforce. A new analysis shows that unauthorized foreign fishing is indeed substantially lower just inside the EEZ boundary compared with just outside.

Animal movements are essential to the economic health of livestock production, but are also a threat to it by promoting disease spread. New research suggests a way towards obtaining an appropriate balance between both aspects in the design of control policies.

Natural disasters affect supply chains in complex ways that traditional economic models at the sector level cannot capture. An agent-based model representing firm-to-firm interactions demonstrates that these interactions magnify the economic cost of disasters.

Co-locating solar panels and crops reduces competition for land between energy and food production. In addition, these agrivoltaic systems create positive synergistic relationships between crops and solar panels.

Dam removal is becoming an increasingly common tool to restore rivers. What would it take to replace lost electricity from removed hydroelectric dams with solar power?

Meat is an important source of greenhouse-gas emissions, but not enough people are giving it up. A new model integrates diets, land use and climate change to explore the potential and implications of mass adoption of vegetarian diets.

Radiative cooling can be used to reduce building air-conditioning requirements. In urban environments, nearby buildings partially block access to the sky, which hinders radiative cooling, but a thermal beam-shaping design can help solve this problem.

The conservation of Boswellia papyrifera, a dryland tree from the Horn of Africa and a source of frankincense, conflicts with growing use. A new study finds impending collapse of this iconic tree throughout its range, prioritizing the need to restrict uncontrolled tapping and cattle herding.

Aquifers and groundwater resources are a critical lifeline for billions of people. Drilling deeper wells is one adaptive strategy to lower groundwater, but uncertainty plagues every aspect of dynamic aquifer systems.

The long-term role of mountains as water providers to lowlands is threatened by shrinking glaciers due to anthropogenic climate change. Modelling this dependence and uncovering past indigenous responses can inform adaptive responses.

Understanding how individuals shift to diets with much smaller ecological footprints may help us in persuading more people to change their habits and transition to more sustainable food systems. Online interactions provide important answers.

Indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) is critical for conservation. Yet, gaps in published research on ILK might bias assessments that largely rely on it. Such fragmented documentation calls for alternative approaches to bring ILK into conservation.

Fairtrade and other voluntary sustainability standards are increasingly common in the food sector. Evidence shows that the benefits of such standards on the poorest people are minimal.

It has long been observed that roads clear the way to deforestation in the tropics. Viewing deforestation scars in the Congo Basin from space, we can now model the impact roads have both inside and outside logging concessions.

Ecosystem-service assessments often fail to account for groundwater’s role in the ecosystem. Whether groundwater is important for these services depends strongly on the assessment scale and the local context.

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.

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.