Reviews & Analysis

Promotion of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) will accompany China’s Belt and Road Initiative. This Perspective notes the potential risks and advocates open-eyed cooperation to build sustainability into this expanding TCM market.

Land use is one of the most contested issues facing global conservation, but degraded lands should be the focus of governments and trusts to take and conserve uncontested areas for nature.

The world is urbanizing. This Review assesses impacts of urban growth on habitat and biodiversity, finding direct impacts more in high-income countries while indirect impacts affect more land but are lesser studied.

The diversity of approaches to knowledge production can be challenging for transdisciplinary teams. This Perspective proposes a way to articulate the epistemology, methodology and implementation underpinning research.

Sustainability is a function of environmental, economic and social integration. This Review synthesizes knowledge on the many ways biodiversity can support sustainable development.

Opportunities, challenges and recommended targeted actions to accelerate qualitative data sharing to address complex socio–environmental problems

To understand and address sustainability problems, a complex model of human behaviour is proposed, one that co-evolves with their context, as opposed to simpler models.

The Sustainable Development Goals elegantly capture humanity’s shared aspirations, but it’s at the national level where the rubber hits the road. Progress is possible across multiple goals but challenges to comprehensive achievement remain.

Phosphorus recovery is as important for closing the phosphorus cycle as its discovery 350 years ago was for food production. A new analysis highlights costs and benefits of creating value from the wastes generated by our food systems and modern lifestyles.

Real-time control of combined sewer systems and green infrastructure can be used to reduce flooding. In this Perspective, the authors simulated the use of integrated stormwater inflow control to dynamically activate infrastructure in Copenhagen, Denmark, to substantially reduce combined sewage emissions.

Researchers and decision-makers lack a shared understanding of resilience. Here, the authors define social-ecological resilience as including three characteristics of social-ecological systems — resistance, recovery and robustness — and show how this framework can help resilience management.

Data from conventional sources cannot fully measure progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Here the authors present a roadmap describing how citizen-science data can integrate traditional data and make a significant contribution in support of the SDGs agenda.

Lack of good-quality monitoring and evaluation data is a key barrier to large-scale uptake of agriculture interventions. Data from low-cost microsatellites have a strong potential to bridge this gap and promote sustainable intensification targets.

Fisheries conservation requires restricting access to countries’ exclusive economic zones (EEZs), which is costly to monitor and enforce. A new analysis shows that unauthorized foreign fishing is indeed substantially lower just inside the EEZ boundary compared with just outside.

This Perspective suggests how a systems perspective on artificial drainage can promote sustainable intensification, limiting nutrient losses and greenhouse-gas emissions and increasing nitrogen-use efficiency.

Animal movements are essential to the economic health of livestock production, but are also a threat to it by promoting disease spread. New research suggests a way towards obtaining an appropriate balance between both aspects in the design of control policies.

Natural disasters affect supply chains in complex ways that traditional economic models at the sector level cannot capture. An agent-based model representing firm-to-firm interactions demonstrates that these interactions magnify the economic cost of disasters.

Co-locating solar panels and crops reduces competition for land between energy and food production. In addition, these agrivoltaic systems create positive synergistic relationships between crops and solar panels.

Dam removal is becoming an increasingly common tool to restore rivers. What would it take to replace lost electricity from removed hydroelectric dams with solar power?

The Sustainable Development Goals require profound national and societal changes. This Perspective introduces six Transformations as building blocks for achieving the SDGs and an agenda for science to provide the requisite knowledge.