Volume 5 Issue 6, June 2022

A short window of opportunity during the COVID-19 economic shutdown provides striking evidence of environmental disparity.

Scholars develop scenarios to identify the operational margins of system Earth, but focus less on how decisions are made that affect the system one way or another. Strategy games can help increase the representation of human agency in scenario development, allowing for deliberation among diverse worldviews.

There is a growing awareness that plastic pollution poses a major environmental threat. This Review highlights the knowledge gap on their long-term impacts and recommends inclusion in life cycle analysis for better decision-making.

A study of how sustainable fruit harvesting in Amazon peatlands can support livelihoods and aid efforts to mitigate climate change.

Assessing the effectiveness of restoration projects faces challenges due to operational issues and the high costs of gathering on-ground data. This study combines satellite observations with quasi-experimental methods to examine the impacts of the Sustainable Land Management Project in Ethiopia.

Despite the growing use of biodiversity offsets from major industrial projects, little is known about how effective they are. This study shows that the offsets associated with the Ambatovy mine in Madagascar trying to compensate for deforestation at the mine site are on track to achieve no net loss of forest.

Minority groups are often disproportionately exposed to air pollution, but what drives these disparities is difficult to analyse. Using the economic shutdown associated with the 2020 COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders, this study estimates pollution exposure disparities caused by the in-person economy in California.

Poor availability and access to clean water is a fundamental sustainability challenge facing our society. Here the authors show that covalent organic framework membranes enable excellent performance in seawater desalination including high permeation flux and fouling resistance, providing a promising technological solution.

The environmental effectiveness of procurement incentives for electric vehicle (EV) sales depends on the behaviour of EV adopters. This study explores such a relationship and how procurement policies should be designed in order to achieve emissions reduction and be economically efficient.

The sheer scale of global development aid projects and funding can be almost impenetrable for researchers and policymakers to derive broad trends, let alone specific topics. This machine learning analysis looks at 3.2 million separate aid activities over the past two decades to find clusters and categories for better targeting of development funds.

Controlled use of fire for subsistence and smallholder livelihoods has undoubtedly shaped ecosystems but we have limited research on the practices and extent. This analysis of nearly 600 case study locations finds fire use is changing in ways that could pose risks to smallholder livelihoods as well as wildlife and biodiversity.