News & Comment

Oxygen electrocatalysis is key for energy conversion and storage technologies such as fuel cells and water electrolysers. However, the measurement of the performance of electrocatalysts is not standardized. This Comment addresses emerging pitfalls in performance evaluation and discusses best practices for oxygen electrocatalysis.

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.

Earth Observation (EO) satellites have transformed understanding of the state and trajectories of Earth’s environment. Recent mushrooming of EO satellites and of resultant data that are stored, distributed and processed, often on the cloud, generate widespread environmental impacts that demand urgent consideration, particularly given that EO data outlive EO satellites.

Rechargeable aqueous zinc metal batteries represent a promising solution to the storage of renewable energy on the gigawatt scale. For a standardized set of protocols for their electrochemical performance measurements, we highlight the current common issues and recommend practices for future studies.

In the context of climate change, the discourse of capacity building may reproduce colonial power dynamics by framing adaptation failures as the responsibility of marginalized communities. “Capacity sharing” offers an alternative paradigm for a more environmentally just and decolonial approach to managing local climate risks.

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.

End-of-life plastics conversion is crucial to reduce plastic pollution and realize a circular economy, argues Ding Ma.

Plastics are ubiquitous, but problematic from a whole life cycle perspective. Nature Sustainability asked four experts to present their views about the ongoing plastics crisis.

Policy making is entering a phase of more transformative strategies targeting the full life cycle of plastics, argues Patrick Schröder.

The rapid increase in plastics waste is worrying, but approaching sufficiency in a broader sense can tackle much more than plastic waste streams only, argues Sylvia Lorek.

When strategizing the design of sustainable polymers, the timescale must be an essential dimension, that is, even for bio-based and/or biodegradable plastics their resource utilization should not outpace resource regeneration, argues Eugene Chen.

Land degradation threatens livelihoods with the potential to displace vulnerable groups, yet its impacts on migration are poorly understood as environmental migration research mainly focuses on the impacts of climate change on migration. We argue that addressing this gap is vital as land degradation poses risks for sustainability.

Media attention to the disastrous consequences of this summer’s wildfires has been at a record high. Now the world should wake up to the urgent need to restore burnt sites.

Principles underpinning the 2030 Agenda — indivisibility, integration and universality — can safeguard against inaction or unsustainable practices but have not yet come into effect. We propose measures to strengthen alignment with them as the world gears up to accelerate implementation at the 2023 SDG Summit.

This season’s wildfires have wreaked havoc for local communities, summer tourists and densely populated cities more than 1,000 km away. International cooperation is urgently needed to ensure humans’ sustainable future with increasing wildfires.

Freshwaters require targeted policy considerations to achieve biodiversity conservation goals and to support ecosystem services that communities around the globe depend upon. Effective conservation requires creative solutions that build and expand upon conventional protected areas, contextualized for these diverse ecosystems.

As the research community remembers John Bannister Goodenough for his contributions to the development of batteries, we reflect on his legacy, what it means to sustainability and where we go next in the quest for a more sustainable future.

Perry L. McCarty, a pioneer in environmental biotechnology, passed away at the age of 91. His contributions to environmental engineering will live on.