Volume 2 Issue 9, September 2019

Transnational environmental crime has become the largest financial driver of social conflict, with severe implications for peace and security. Sustainable-development frameworks need to overtly recognize and mitigate the risks posed by transnational environmental crime to environmental security.

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?

Record-breaking fire seasons are becoming the new normal, prompting calls for land management and policy reforms. This Perspective clarifies different types of resilience to wildfire to prioritize efforts to better coexist with increasingly fire-prone conditions.

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.

Updated forest inventories are critical for policymaking. This study presents an approach to map coordinated top-down European forest management strategies that spatially weighs the multifunctionality of European forests. Such an approach should help identify pathways to manage forests sustainably.

Public understandings of how economic, environmental and social aspects relate in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) varies. A large-sample study finds how some emphasize the trade-offs between them, and others view that the SDGs address all aspects simultaneously.

A scenario simulation to tackle hunger globally reveals that improving food availability for the under-nourished through better distribution has a better environmental performance than increasing overall food availability.

Moving livestock is essential to the industry, but such mobility can spread disease. Considering three livestock diseases in the UK, this study finds that movement controls should be matched to the consequences of a disease and, crucially, that optimal movement bans are often far shorter than allowed under existing policy.

The diffusion of economic shocks from earthquakes is simulated at the firm level in Japan, using an agent-based model and the supply chains of nearly one million firms. Indirect losses to production are significantly larger and more persistent than direct ones.

Agrivoltaics can achieve synergistic benefits by growing agricultural plants under raised solar panels. In this article, the authors showed that growth under solar panels reduced tomato and pepper drought stress and increased production, while simultaneously reducing photovoltaic panel heat stress.

Toxic heavy metal ions need to be removed from drinking water to protect public health. In this article, the authors demonstrated pressure-free removal of positively and negatively charged heavy metal ions from water using 2D MXene-based films.

Floating treatment wetlands can improve wastewater treatment plant performance. In this Analysis, the authors conducted a three-year study of full-scale floating treatment wetlands in stabilization ponds and showed substantially improved water quality and reduced heavy metal concentrations.

While renewable energy has often included hydropower, dams present their own environmental harms. This Analysis not only projects how much land would be needed for solar power to replace US hydropower, but also provides a model for further analyses in other countries.

Renewable energy costs have declined in the past but things could change with increasing interest rates. This study shows that in Germany, if interest rates increased to pre-financial crisis levels in 5 years, the levelized cost of solar photovoltaics and onshore wind could rise by 11 and 25%, respectively.