Volume 2 Issue 1, January 2019

Policymakers and investors have perceived securing soil organic carbon as too difficult, with uncertain returns. But new technical, policy and financial opportunities offer hope for rapid progress.

Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals requires examining the impacts of health interventions across multiple sectors and identifying regions where health–development–environment conflicts are most likely. Doing this is important for ending the epidemic of malaria by 2030 alongside achieving other SDGs.

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.

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.

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.

Waste plastic can be converted into a potential fuel source using a new nano-scale catalyst. This catalyst has well-defined and uniform surface openings, so it needs only one step to convert low-density polyethylene into a gasoline-type product.

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.

Maintaining food security by increasing smallholder production is a global sustainability concern. This study uses field trials on potatoes to demonstrate the positive impact of within-species diversification on yield, disease resistance and improved soil health.

To achieve both biodiversity conservation and timber production in tropical forests, this modelling study finds that improved management has much more impact than the choice between sparing forests or sharing forest land for both purposes.

Offshore mariculture could promote food security and economic development while sparing wild fisheries. This model-based study finds that the Caribbean could produce over 40 million metric tons of cobia (Rachycentron canadum), about half as much as the current global wild fish catch, and in less than 1.5% of the study area.

The rooftop photovoltaics (PV) industry in the United States has grown significantly, but little is known about any racial and ethnic disparity in PV adoption. This study compares the adoption of rooftop PV across census areas grouped by racial and ethnic majority. It finds that in census areas that have predominantly black or Hispanic people, average rooftop PV installation is significantly lower.