Research articles

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.

Biofuels, produced from grass, algae and other organisms alive today, supplement fuels produced through geological processes. This study finds that moderate intensification of prairie perennial plants can optimize benefits of the resultant biofuels, including soil carbon, greenhouse gas benefits and fuel production.

Cryptocurrency mining requires extensive energy consumption for computers to verify the blockchain and generate new currency. This analysis compares several cryptocurrencies and metals in terms of the amount of energy needed to create one US dollar of value, as well as the carbon emissions that may be directly attributable to cryptocurrency mining.

Provision of electricity in sub-Saharan Africa is often affected by outages leading to increased use of backup diesel generators. In this study, the authors estimate the air emissions, consumer costs and fossil energy consumption resulting from the use of such generators.

The net environmental costs of rare earths production in China, the largest producer, are estimated to be almost US$15 billion. Scenarios show that the largest reduction in environmental impact can be achieved by tackling illegal mining.