Volume 5 Issue 1, January 2022

Degraded land is being restored along an 8,000 km stretch across Sahelian countries. A new analysis reveals promising economic returns from recent projects and informs the targeting of strategies for newly pledged funds.

Historical and future trends in sustainability performance show that the world’s countries have substantially overshot their fair share of most planetary boundaries, without proportional social achievements.

With rising fossil fuel consumption and ongoing land cover change, humanity is burning through its remaining carbon budget. Recent work puts a ‘Do not disturb’ sign on biospheric carbon we can’t afford to lose.

Sustainable farming of fish requires their feed to be responsibly sourced. New research illustrates how we could convert industrial carbon emissions into a valuable feed resource.

Doubling food productivity in smallholder farms — a major goal to achieve global food security, according to the United Nations — may come with additional nutrient needs. A new study reports that some regions will require almost 40% more phosphorus between 2015 and 2030 to meet this objective.

Oceanic uranium represents a vast fuel resource that could ensure the long-term sustainability of nuclear power. A new study seeks to harness that potential by developing a bioinspired adsorbent membrane capable of capturing uranium from seawater.

Whether payments for ecosystem services (PES) are effective and how they change the motivations of land and resource users in the long-term is still controversial. A study of a program in Ecuador provides encouraging results regarding what happens if payments stop.

A cost–benefit analysis of land restoration in the African Great Green Wall shows that, under a range of assumptions, the investment makes economic sense at a regional level, despite the differences across countries and biomes.

Historical dynamics show that no country has achieved minimum social thresholds within biophysical boundaries between 1992 and 2015, and a projection indicates that no country is on the path to achieve them.

Avoiding catastrophic climate change requires that we avoid losing key natural carbon reserves. This study maps such irrecoverable carbon globally and finds a third of the remaining managed by Indigenous peoples and local communities and nearly a quarter in protected areas.

Methanotrophic bacteria can capture waste greenhouse gas emissions and feed fish, reducing the need for wild captures. An economic analysis shows great potential for this approach to replace aquaculture feed at competitive prices.

Phosphorous is limited in many tropical soils. This study finds that, despite such limitation, sub-Saharan Africa is on track to nearly doubling productivity on smallholder farms while some regions will require almost 40% more phosphorous applied between 2015 and 2030.

Soil fungi can form beneficial associations with plant roots. This study finds that arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi can increase crop uptake of nitrogen derived from common trees in African smallholder maize fields, sustainably enhancing these agroecosystems.

The vast amount of uranium in seawater is driving a shift from the use of mined ore to seawater extraction. Here the authors describe an adsorbent design based on polymers of intrinsic microporosity that adopts a bioinspired structure and allows efficient uranium capture.

A long-term analysis of payments to reduce grazing on a threatened ecosystem in Ecuador shows that, despite intermittence of the programme and the resulting uncertainty, grazing behaviour among households diminished consistently