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The world is not on track to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 6 on clean water and sanitation by 2030. We urge a rapid change of the economics, engineering and management frameworks that guided water policy and investments in the past in order to address the water challenges of our time.
The global food system must become more sustainable. Digital agriculture — digital and geospatial technologies to monitor, assess and manage soil, climatic and genetic resources — illustrates how to meet this challenge so as to balance the economic, environmental and social dimensions of sustainable food production.
Energy fuels, and is central to, all physical and biological systems, including the human population and economy. Yet science has missed the significance of civilization’s growing energy consumption. The energetics of the global food system illustrate the counterintuitive aspects of present energy consumption circumstances.
A growing, increasingly affluent and urban human population is driving demand for more food grown in more-sustainable ways. This issue features a suite of articles highlighting how intensification of production on existing farmland and with fewer inputs is an aspirational and data-hungry challenge.
The assessment of land degradation and restoration by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services shows that land degradation across the globe is a wide and severe issue and is showing no signs of slowing down. This trend must be halted and reversed.
Disadvantaged communities are vulnerable to the impacts of lead exposure risking further worsening of their living standards, an outcome likely to weaken global efforts towards the Sustainable Development Goals. We urge policy makers to adopt protection systems aimed at safeguarding the most threatened populations.
Changes in social and environmental conditions in the Western Highlands of Guatemala undermine food security and job opportunities. We describe how targeted assistance can build upon traditional agricultural systems to increase adaptive capacity, improve nutrition, provide jobs and thereby reduce pressures to migrate.
While global efforts to tackle hunger and other food-related crises are stepping up, Nature Sustainability and the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability convene a new Expert Panel focusing on system changes and human agency.
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.
After a year of intense activities, the University of Virginia–Nature Sustainability Expert Panel on behavioural science for design is ready to share its main findings and eager to bring more experts on board.
An international expert panel probes how engineers, architects and behavioural scientists can work together to learn about design behaviour for sustainability — and what all interested scholars and practitioners might learn from it.
In light of pressing societal and environmental problems, sustainability science must advance faster than before. In order to contribute to a cumulative body of knowledge, such research needs shared infrastructure, database development and changes in research culture.
