Volume 1 Issue 11, November 2018

The conservation movement has lost its critical edge by befriending agribusiness. With deforestation on the rise and a continuous roll-back of environmental protection, it is time to rethink this strategy.

Marinez Scherer is an expert in integrated coastal management and executive secretary of the Brazilian Sea Forum. Alberto Lindner is an expert in marine ecology and conservation. Both are at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil, and here discuss recent trends in marine and coastal science and policy in Brazil.

Current understanding is that electricity savings in green commercial buildings are low or even negligible. New research, based on a sophisticated analysis of detailed energy data, proves that they do save energy, decrease environmental damage and reduce peak electricity demand.

Behind pressing scientific questions of sustainability, unexplored areas of theoretical and mathematical knowledge await discovery. A fresh take on the notion of resilience provides a glimpse of what to expect.

Reservoirs are frequently posited as a method of increasing water supplies, especially in arid areas. However, they may be inducing and enabling demands for water through increased population and economic activity, and these demands can surpass even the supply that the reservoir can provide and counterintuitively make the areas more vulnerable to drought conditions.

The interaction between land degradation and the livelihoods of the poor is complex and conditioned by important economic, social and environmental factors. These factors are also in part responsible for the limited success of economic growth policies to reduce poverty.

Resistance to antimicrobials and pesticides — collectively, biocides — undermines human health and food production. This Review assesses options for governing and promoting susceptibility to biocides to remain within the planet’s safe operating space.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.