Volume 3 Issue 1, January 2020

In light of pressing societal and environmental problems, sustainability science must advance faster than before. In order to contribute to a cumulative body of knowledge, such research needs shared infrastructure, database development and changes in research culture.

A convening of leading international sustainability experts met for the first time in Potsdam, Germany, in March 2019 to re-think sustainability primarily as a societal challenge. Ortwin Renn and Solène Droy from the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies tell Nature Sustainability about the initiative.

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.

Adoption of air conditioning is increasing globally, leading to peaks in electricity consumption and related environmental concerns. Compiling recent data on population and temperature, this study ranks 219 countries and 1,692 cities based on a measure of cooling demand to improve our understanding of future trends.

The degradation and recycling of thermoset materials are major sustainability challenges. The synthesized thermoset hyperbranched polymers (HER-HT_n) reported in this study exhibit recoverability and rapid degradability in more environmentally friendly phosphoric acid solutions.

Governance is one of the critical components for sustainability, but quantification within scenarios and projections of future socioeconomic development has been lacking. This analysis of various pathways looks at how best to overcome ‘weak’ governance and strengthen adaptive capacity.

Knowing how and why households stop using solid-fuel stoves after adopting clean fuels can inform policies for energy transitions. This study shows that in China over one-third and one-fifth of participants suspended use of solid fuel for cooking and heating, respectively, during the past 20 years.

Soil erosion threatens food production and ecosystems. This study finds that soil erosion rates change significantly at national borders, probably reflecting agricultural characteristics that vary among countries.

Flooding is the costliest natural disaster. Focusing on the United States, this analysis finds that by 2070 avoided damages exceed land acquisition costs for more than one-third of unprotected natural lands in the 100-year floodplain.

Pesticides overuse has led to evolution of resistance but the associated crop yield losses or economic costs at large scale are not known. This study estimates the annual cost of resistance in England for black-grass and calls for national-scale planning to address the problem.