Q&As

Dario Fornara, research director of the Davines Group–Rodale Institute European Regenerative Organic Center (EROC), talks to Nature Sustainability about the making of EROC and the benefits of an integrated partnership between the private and the non-profit sectors to advance sustainability.

Phoebe Koundouri, Professor of Environmental Economics and Sustainability at Athens University of Economics and Business, talks to Nature Sustainability about how the Global Climate Hub can help countries achieve sustainability against the backdrop of interconnected, complex challenges.

Veera Mitzner, Director of the Sustainability Research & Innovation (SRI) Congress and Associate Director of Future Earth US Global Hub, and Omar R. López Alfano, Director of the National Research System, SENACYT, Panama, and President of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research, talk to Nature Sustainability about the success and prospects of the SRI Congress.

Paul Akiwumi, director of the Africa, least developed countries and special programmes division of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, explains the present challenges of the low-carbon transition to sustainable development in the world’s most vulnerable developing countries.

Anna Berti Suman is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC). She is the principal researcher of the Sensing for Justice (SensJus) project, which explores the applications of civic environmental monitoring for environmental justice.

Julie Zimmerman takes a complete systems-thinking approach towards lowering consumption of non-renewable resources and the technological approaches to get there. As professor of chemical and environmental engineering, environment, and epidemiology at Yale University, she is taking green chemistry to new levels.

Citizen science efforts are instrumental in monitoring our progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Dilek Fraisl, Research Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, and Omar Seidu, Director of Social and Demographic Statistics and the SDGs Coordinator at the Ghana Statistical Service, discuss how Ghana successfully integrated citizen science data into its official monitoring of marine plastic debris.

Margot Wallström, former European Commissioner for the Environment and former Foreign Secretary of Sweden, led an international expert panel at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute to study the intertwined risks of global environmental crises and conflict.

Farhad Taghizadeh-Hesary is an associate professor of economics at the school of global studies of Tokai University in Japan and vice-president and co-founder of the International Society for Energy Transition Studies based in Australia. He talks about bringing private investment to sustainability projects.

Mounting evidence of the effect of pollution on human health is shaping the field of sustainability in clinical care. Jodi Sherman, MD and associate professor at the Yale School of Medicine and Yale School of Public Health, explains that healthcare pollution harms public health, is underappreciated and escapes oversight of health services.

Water research has fallen into a ‘techno optimism’ that tries to solve all problems despite not asking fundamental questions, according to Stephanie Pincetl of the University of California, Los Angeles. She talks to Nature Sustainability about the challenges facing the field and science writ large.

Dr Shailja Vaidya Gupta is Senior Adviser at the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India. She tells Nature Sustainability about the challenges of climate negotiations from her country’s perspective, views are her own.

Multiple policy tools are needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Åsa Persson, from the Stockholm Environment Institute and a member of the Independent Group of Scientists working on the 2023 United Nations Global Sustainable Development Report, speaks to Nature Sustainability about the complexity of research comparing the impacts of policy instruments.

A Global Pact for the Environment is gathering pace to become a binding international agreement. Yann Aguila, Sciences Po, and Jorge Viñuales, University of Cambridge, talk to Nature Sustainability about its global significance and potential, and about the importance of social support to make it happen.

Awaiting the Fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to be held in China late in 2021, Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, Executive Secretary to the CBD, talks to Nature Sustainability about the challenges of stepping up efforts to address biodiversity decline.

Experts around the world have been informing governments’ plans for a post-pandemic recovery. Leena Srivastava, Deputy Director General for Science at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), and Heide Hackmann, Chief Executive officer at the International Science Council (ISC), talk to Nature Sustainability about the recent joint effort ‘Bouncing forward sustainably. Pathways to a post-COVID world’.

Michael Norton, from the European Academies Science Advisory Council, and Baldwyn Torto, from the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology, talk with Nature Sustainability about recent efforts to address neonicotinoid insecticide risks in Africa.

Jon Hutton and Melanie Ryan, respectively the Director and the Head of Programme of the Luc Hoffmann Institute, tell Nature Sustainability about the making of the Biodiversity Revisited project.

Pushpam Kumar, Chief Environmental Economist at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), talks to Nature Sustainability about the need to focus on wealth to achieve sustainability.

A convening of leading international sustainability experts met for the first time in Potsdam, Germany, in March 2019 to re-think sustainability primarily as a societal challenge. Ortwin Renn and Solène Droy from the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies tell Nature Sustainability about the initiative.