Volume 1 Issue 7, July 2018

Academic enterprises seeking to support society’s efforts to achieve global sustainability need to change their legacy reward systems. We need new structures to foster knowledge that is deeply integrated across disciplines and co-produced with non-academic stakeholders.

The rapid growth of bottled water use in low- and middle-income countries, and its normalization as a daily source of drinking water, does not provide a pathway to universal access. Generous and sustained investment in centralized and community utilities remains the most viable means for achieving safe water access for all.

A leadership forum could hasten understanding of complex problems, thanks to a historic meet-up of research pioneers.

At the global scale, indigenous lands are critical for biodiversity conservation and cultural survival. Yet at local, sub-national and national scales both are often threatened.

Most of the sustainability challenges and opportunities associated with urbanization are found in the global south. This Perspective shows the extent to which urban issues differ between the developed and developing worlds and identifies steps to re-focus the urban research system globally in view of allowing a more prominent role of urban scholarship from the global south.

A shift away from fossil fuel subsidies to carbon pricing could generate revenues to finance progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals. This Perspective shows that in many low-income countries, as private sources of finance are limited, revenues from carbon taxes could be a particularly attractive policy option for financing the SDGs.

The implementation of technologic solutions to complex problems can have unintended effects. This study questions the water sustainability of using shade balls in the Los Angeles reservoir to reduce evaporation during the recent drought in California, by assessing the shade balls’ water footprint.

Organic farming produces crops without using synthetic agrochemicals, but its success with pests is unclear. This study finds that organic farming promotes overall pest control but that varies by pest type, with lower pathogen pests, similar animal pests and higher weed pests than conventional agriculture.

Land management and ownership by Indigenous Peoples are critical components of conservation strategies, but information on these has previously never been aggregated. Here, global data is compiled to show that Indigenous Peoples have tenure rights or manage a quarter of the world’s land area and 40% of all protected areas and intact ecosystems.