Research articles

The rooftop photovoltaics (PV) industry in the United States has grown significantly, but little is known about any racial and ethnic disparity in PV adoption. This study compares the adoption of rooftop PV across census areas grouped by racial and ethnic majority. It finds that in census areas that have predominantly black or Hispanic people, average rooftop PV installation is significantly lower.

Offshore mariculture could promote food security and economic development while sparing wild fisheries. This model-based study finds that the Caribbean could produce over 40 million metric tons of cobia (Rachycentron canadum), about half as much as the current global wild fish catch, and in less than 1.5% of the study area.

To achieve both biodiversity conservation and timber production in tropical forests, this modelling study finds that improved management has much more impact than the choice between sparing forests or sharing forest land for both purposes.

Maintaining food security by increasing smallholder production is a global sustainability concern. This study uses field trials on potatoes to demonstrate the positive impact of within-species diversification on yield, disease resistance and improved soil health.

The Sustainable Development Goals agenda is proposed as an interconnected framework that requires policy coherence for implementation. This study shows that the connections across goals are uneven and that gender equality, peace and governance concerns are not adequately integrated.

Global environmental change complicates the goal of securing adequate nutrition for a growing world population. This study assesses the per capita availability of food nutrients for various scenarios to the year 2050. Results suggest that economic growth will expand food and macronutrient access more than climate change will suppress it, but that micronutrient inadequacies will plague some regions.

Human diets strongly affect prospects for relative sustainability, affecting health, land, water, biodiversity and livelihoods. This study finds that select ‘future foods’, including insects, seaweed and cultured meat, provide major environmental benefits compared with current animal-source foods while safeguarding key micronutrients essential for human health.

Solar desalination is an attractive alternative to energy-intensive conventional seawater desalination. In this study, the authors present a completely passive, multi-stage and low-cost distiller using layers of membranes to achieve a distillate flow rate of almost 3 l m^–2 h^–1.

US coastlines that are exposed to hurricanes are subject to a myriad of regulations regarding building and rebuilding of structures, yet satellite imagery shows that the footprint of residential buildings increases after hurricane events for both new and renovated structures. Such an effect poses a challenge for vulnerable coastlines to build resilience in the face of growing hazards and houses.

Reducing direct economic losses from disasters is part of mitigating disaster impacts. This study presents an update to the leading dataset on normalized US hurricane losses in the continental United States from 1900 to 2017.

'No net loss’ biodiversity policies seek to offset biodiversity losses caused by economic development. This study assesses the global extent of such biodiversity offsets, finding that they occupy an area much larger than recognized and that most are small and implemented due to regulatory requirements.

Aviation biofuels for climate change mitigation may be detrimental to other sustainability goals, according to a life-cycle assessment. Negative effects can be mitigated with appropriate technology and supply-chain management.

A provision of the Forest Act in Brazil could legalize deforestation of an additional 6.5–15 million ha of private lands, under a plausible scenario of protected public land reaching 65% in some states.

Sustainability depends on the resilience of natural, social and engineered systems. This theoretical study quantifies resilience to repeated disturbances, synthesizing understanding of how the sizes of shocks, or ‘kicks’, and recovery, or ‘flows’, contribute to maintaining systems in desirable states.

An ecological evaluation of the largest community-based conservation initiative along the Amazon river also shows significant benefits for non-targeted species. This 40-year-old project targets the giant South American turtle.

Assessing electricity consumption in green-certified buildings using high-frequency hourly data shows that such buildings reduce energy demand particularly during peak times, which has additional environmental and economic benefits.

Human and animal faeces simultaneously threaten global health and provide resources for recovery. This study presents the first global-scale analysis of recoverable faeces from 2003 projected to 2030 and of associated burdens. Production from domestic animals is about four times that of humans, emphasizing the need for better onsite management.

China’s coal-dominated power system is a source of carbon emissions, local air pollution and water stress. This study presents three power system development scenarios that run until 2030 in China, where coal strategies are optimized under current environmental regulations and varying prices for air pollutant emissions and water.

Wet biowaste from food processing and animal manure can be converted into biocrude oil using HTL. In this study, the authors combined distillation and esterification to upgrade biocrude into diesel blendstock and performed engine tests using it.

This study spatially maps the economic value of some major ecosystem services provided by the Brazilian Amazon. It also estimates changes in these values under scenarios of degradation and low-impact logging.