Perspectives in 2019

Promotion of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) will accompany China’s Belt and Road Initiative. This Perspective notes the potential risks and advocates open-eyed cooperation to build sustainability into this expanding TCM market.

Land use is one of the most contested issues facing global conservation, but degraded lands should be the focus of governments and trusts to take and conserve uncontested areas for nature.

The diversity of approaches to knowledge production can be challenging for transdisciplinary teams. This Perspective proposes a way to articulate the epistemology, methodology and implementation underpinning research.

Opportunities, challenges and recommended targeted actions to accelerate qualitative data sharing to address complex socio–environmental problems

To understand and address sustainability problems, a complex model of human behaviour is proposed, one that co-evolves with their context, as opposed to simpler models.

Real-time control of combined sewer systems and green infrastructure can be used to reduce flooding. In this Perspective, the authors simulated the use of integrated stormwater inflow control to dynamically activate infrastructure in Copenhagen, Denmark, to substantially reduce combined sewage emissions.

Researchers and decision-makers lack a shared understanding of resilience. Here, the authors define social-ecological resilience as including three characteristics of social-ecological systems — resistance, recovery and robustness — and show how this framework can help resilience management.

Data from conventional sources cannot fully measure progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Here the authors present a roadmap describing how citizen-science data can integrate traditional data and make a significant contribution in support of the SDGs agenda.

This Perspective suggests how a systems perspective on artificial drainage can promote sustainable intensification, limiting nutrient losses and greenhouse-gas emissions and increasing nitrogen-use efficiency.

The Sustainable Development Goals require profound national and societal changes. This Perspective introduces six Transformations as building blocks for achieving the SDGs and an agenda for science to provide the requisite knowledge.

Record-breaking fire seasons are becoming the new normal, prompting calls for land management and policy reforms. This Perspective clarifies different types of resilience to wildfire to prioritize efforts to better coexist with increasingly fire-prone conditions.

In the Anthropocene, our global influence extends to risks. This Perspective argues for including human–environment interactions in our understanding of systemic risks and considers four illustrative case studies, including sea-level rise and megacities.

The international community has committed to fight climate change and achieve 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Here the authors assess evidence about the relationships between the two agendas and discuss the need of deeper interdisciplinary efforts to understand these relationships.

Managing the interactions and impacts of scaled-up solar energy production will require understanding of the relationships between technological and ecological systems. This Perspective proposes a framework that could help engineer beneficial outcomes from an energy transition.

Understanding how people and ecosystems are connected is a continuing and vital challenge. This Perspective suggests many environmental problems revolve around common core challenges and advocates using network approaches that acknowledge key underlying assumptions.

Sanitation is usually considered just an engineering and public health issue. This Perspective suggests avenues by which recoverable resources can enhance ecosystem services, such as provisioning nutrients for food production, and suggests synergies that can promote sustainable development.

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.

Urban systems must adapt to climatic and other global change. This Perspective uses urban systems to argue that sustainability and resilience are complementary but not interchangeable and that, in some cases, resilience can even render cities unsustainable.

Sand and gravel have become important commodities due to infrastructure and coastal protection schemes, leading to shortages on a global level. This Perspective looks at how Greenland could diversify its economy towards export of its sand resources and the potential impacts on the environment and local way of life.

Effectively managing natural capital and its associated ecosystem services is difficult given that the effects of most actions depend on the wider environmental conditions. This Perspective presents an analytical framework that allows identifying why and where management actions can best enhance natural capital.