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The Millennium Development Goal target 7c, to halve the proportion of the global population without access to safe drinking water by 2015, is the first international drinking water target ever met. Understanding how this was achieved is critical to replicating success.
Protected areas, such as parks and marine reserves, are a vital conservation tools. A new study models the trade-offs between using limited resources for acquiring new protected areas and managing existing ones.
Addressing sustainability challenges requires attention to the material basis of society. This Perspective illustrates how a Systems Thinking in Chemistry Education framework could help to integrate knowledge about the molecular world with the sustainability of Earth and societal systems.
How people respond to sustainability challenges is crucial. New findings suggest that when individuals adopt one pro-environmental behaviour, this might affect whether or not they engage in other, related behaviours.
In many countries, it is difficult for government agencies to know where animal farms are located. Using satellite imaging and deep learning provides a new, effective, accurate and low-cost approach for detecting these facilities.
The world’s food system is complex, highly interconnected and rapidly evolving. Attendant risks are poorly understood. A new study reveals important insight into how interconnectedness, structure and modularity of the global food network impact system resilience.
Urban systems must adapt to climatic and other global change. This Perspective uses urban systems to argue that sustainability and resilience are complementary but not interchangeable and that, in some cases, resilience can even render cities unsustainable.
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) can influence each other positively or negatively. Climate change, inequalities and irresponsible consumption and production currently stand in the way of meeting the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
Bee keeping is on the rise in cities. Beehive products can be used to trace the source and transport of metal contaminants by studying one of our favourite food stuffs — honey.
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and other high-level agreements acknowledge the linked nature of social and biophysical systems. This Review explains one research tradition, sociometabolic research, that explores these links. Sociometabolic research uses methods from systems science and allied areas to study the biophysical basis of economic activity. The authors use tangible examples from recent research to demonstrate strengths and weaknesses and then explore future directions.
Growing populations and climate change place new demands on agriculture. Intensive farming in ancient Hawai‘i demonstrates efficient and resilient land allocation.
Commercial aircraft rely on liquid hydrocarbon fuels. Short-range all-electric aircraft have promise to reduce environmental impacts while remaining cost-competitive; however, they will require significant battery improvements.
Sand and gravel have become important commodities due to infrastructure and coastal protection schemes, leading to shortages on a global level. This Perspective looks at how Greenland could diversify its economy towards export of its sand resources and the potential impacts on the environment and local way of life.
Effectively managing natural capital and its associated ecosystem services is difficult given that the effects of most actions depend on the wider environmental conditions. This Perspective presents an analytical framework that allows identifying why and where management actions can best enhance natural capital.
Land-use planning to protect tropical forests requires understanding the relative impact of alternative uses. Low-impact forest management is crucial to produce timber while conserving biodiversity.
The value of ecosystem services in cities around the world is highly uncertain. This Review focuses on ten of the most commonly cited urban ecosystem services and presents a synthesis of the scholarship on the factors that moderate the value and equitable distribution of such services.
Transgressing planetary boundaries has generated global, ongoing and interconnected problems that represent a real challenge to policy makers. This Perspective sheds light on the complexities of designing policies that can keep human life within the biophysical limits of planet Earth.
Since the 1990s, global agricultural output has been driven largely by innovations that raised the efficiency of using labour, land and other inputs, together called total factor productivity (TFP). This Perspective discusses this reality and suggests two pathways for future growth: technology-based and ecosystem-based. Future research on farm-system sustainability and resilience should leverage these options.
Biofuels became controversial for compromising food production. Forest residue conversion to jet fuel is a second-generation biofuel that doesn’t compete with food. However, it has unexpected implications across the Sustainable Development Goals.
