Environmental sciences articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Brazil is a wildfire-prone region, and few studies have investigated the health impacts of wildfire exposure. Here, the authors show that wildfire waves are associated with an increase of 23% in respiratory hospital admissions and an increase of 21% in circulatory hospital admissions in Brazil.

    • Weeberb J. Requia
    • , Heresh Amini
    •  & Joel D. Schwartz

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Nearly one-third of the global coastline is vegetated. Incorporating these vegetation belts in coastal protection strategies would result in more sustainable and financially-attractive designs to mitigate the impacts of extreme coastal storms.

    • Vincent T. M. van Zelst
    • , Jasper T. Dijkstra
    •  & Mindert B. de Vries

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The implications of delaying carbon dioxide removal (CDR) are poorly understood. Here the authors highlight the potential extra costs and reduced removal potential of delayed CDR action, with a special focus on direct air capture and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (DACCS and BECCS).

    • Ángel Galán-Martín
    • , Daniel Vázquez
    •  & Gonzalo Guillén-Gosálbez

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Knowing how individual water molecules interact with surfaces is crucial for understanding surface and interface phenomena. Here, the authors show how local water-water interactions enable an unforeseen and surprisingly rapid mechanism of atom exchange between a common mineral and its surroundings.

    • Zdenek Jakub
    • , Matthias Meier
    •  & Gareth S. Parkinson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ammonia emissions from agricultural sources can cause severe health impacts. Here, the authors show that about 25% of global agricultural ammonia emissions in 2012 were related to international exported goods and caused 61 thousand PM2.5 related premature deaths, which points out large ammonia mitigation potential in international trade.

    • Rong Ma
    • , Ke Li
    •  & Jing Meng

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Flash droughts can have devastating impacts but are notoriously difficult to predict. This study identifies global hotspots of flash drought, driven by evaporative demand and precipitation deficits across varying geographic regions and crop-type, providing a framework for flash drought prediction.

    • Jordan I. Christian
    • , Jeffrey B. Basara
    •  & Robb M. Randall

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How structurally complex interfaces mediate bubble bursting might significantly impact environmental and industrial processes. Here, authors investigate the bubble-bursting jets dynamics of oil-covered aqueous surface and show how these can also disperse insoluble organic contaminants.

    • Bingqiang Ji
    • , Zhengyu Yang
    •  & Jie Feng

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Accurate assessments of ice-sheet runoff are essential for sea-level projections. A new method using satellite altimeter observations can provide near real-time surface mass balance measurements across an entire ice sheet and reveal runoff variability not captured by global climate models.

    • Thomas Slater
    • , Andrew Shepherd
    •  & Kate Briggs

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The emplacement of the Karoo LIP occurred synchronously with the Toarcian crisis, which is characterized by negative carbon isotope excursions. Here the authors use carbon cycle modelling to show that thermogenic carbon released during LIP emplacement represents a plausible source for the negative excursions.

    • Thea H. Heimdal
    • , Yves Goddéris
    •  & Henrik H. Svensen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Satellite-derived chlorophyll data and Google Earth Engine (GEE) are used to introduce the first global map of coastal eutrophication potential as a GEE app. The prospects of the app being used as a global framework for eutrophication screening/monitoring are discussed.

    • Elígio de Raús Maúre
    • , Genki Terauchi
    •  & Michael DeWitt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Building construction causes large material-related emissions which present a serious decarbonization challenge. Here, the authors show that the building material sector could halve emissions by increasing efficiency until 2060 but even then its emissions would be twice as high as needed to meet the 1.5 °C target.

    • Xiaoyang Zhong
    • , Mingming Hu
    •  & Paul Behrens

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Much effort is invested in calibrating model parameters for accurate outputs, but established methods can be inefficient and generic. By learning from big dataset, a new differentiable framework for model parameterization outperforms state-of-the-art methods, produce more physically-coherent results, using a fraction of the training data, computational power, and time. The method promotes a deep integration of machine learning with process-based geoscientific models.

    • Wen-Ping Tsai
    • , Dapeng Feng
    •  & Chaopeng Shen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Rivers are increasingly plagued by “syndromes”, i.e. salinization, mineralization, desalinization, acidification, alkalization, hardening and softening. A global look at river biogeochemistry reveals dramatically increased flux estimates and anthropogenic drivers of syndromes.

    • Jiang Wu
    • , Nan Xu
    •  & Jinren Ni

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Perovskite photovoltaics has become more competitive against silicon counterpart in reducing cost of solar energy, yet the management of toxic lead hampers it application. Here, the authors propose a cost-effective environmental-friendly approach to recycle lead and transparent conductors.

    • Bo Chen
    • , Chengbin Fei
    •  & Jinsong Huang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The Antarctic ozone hole has had far-reaching impacts, but effects on geochemical cycles in polar regions is still unknown. Iodine records from the interior of Antarctica provide evidence for human alteration of the natural geochemical cycle of this essential element.

    • Andrea Spolaor
    • , François Burgay
    •  & Alfonso Saiz-Lopez

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Sea spray aerosol (SSA) are an important way through which oceans can influence the atmosphere’s radiative properties. Here, the authors present measurements taken over a 42,000 km ship cruise in the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean and show that SSA number concentrations vary over a 24-hour cycle, possibly linked to surface water bubble-bursting dynamics.

    • J. Michel Flores
    • , Guillaume Bourdin
    •  & Ilan Koren

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Nowhere is biomass burning more abundant than on the African continent, but the biogeochemical impacts on forests are poorly understood. Here the authors show that biomass burning leads to high phosphorus deposition in the Congo basin, which scales with forest age as a result of increasing canopy complexity.

    • Marijn Bauters
    • , Travis W. Drake
    •  & Pascal Boeckx

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Accurate seasonal forecasts of sea ice are highly valuable, particularly in the context of sea ice loss due to global warming. A new machine learning tool for sea ice forecasting offers a substantial increase in accuracy over current physics-based dynamical model predictions.

    • Tom R. Andersson
    • , J. Scott Hosking
    •  & Emily Shuckburgh

  • Article
    | Open Access

    N2 fixation was key to the expansion of life on Earth, but which organisms fixed N2 and if Mo-nitrogenase was functional in the low Mo early ocean is unknown. Here, the authors show that purple sulfur bacteria fix N2 using Mo-nitrogenase in a Proterozoic ocean analogue, despite low Mo conditions.

    • Miriam Philippi
    • , Katharina Kitzinger
    •  & Marcel M. M. Kuypers

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Methane emissions from oil and gas systems are underestimated in official inventories. Here the authors synthesize thousands of field measurements and develop an inventory-based model for a better understanding of why this underestimation exists and how it can be fixed.

    • Jeffrey S. Rutherford
    • , Evan D. Sherwin
    •  & Adam R. Brandt

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Outdoor air pollution contributes to millions of deaths worldwide yet air pollution has differential exposures across racial/ethnic groups and socioeconomic status. While green infrastructure has the potential to decrease air pollution and provide other benefits to human health, vegetation alone cannot resolve health disparities related to air pollution injustice. We discuss how unequal access to green infrastructure can limit air quality improvements for marginalized communities and provide strategies to move forward.

    • Viniece Jennings
    • , Colleen E. Reid
    •  & Christina H. Fuller

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This paper quantifies global urban water scarcity in 2016 and 2050 and explores potential solutions. One third to nearly half of the global urban population is projected to face water scarcity problems.

    • Chunyang He
    • , Zhifeng Liu
    •  & Brett A. Bryan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The global water demands of irrigated agriculture are estimated through country surveys or through hydrological models, but both approaches are taxing. Here, the authors show that they can simply be estimated as a function of irrigated areas.

    • Arnald Puy
    • , Emanuele Borgonovo
    •  & Andrea Saltelli

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Plastics are major marine pollutants, and while research suggests that they can release potential harmful additives into seawater, how environmental conditions influence this is unknown. Here the authors determine that byproducts released from microplastics are less under deep-sea conditions versus surface.

    • Vincent Fauvelle
    • , Marc Garel
    •  & Richard Sempéré

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Lead toxicity poses a big hurdle for the commercialization of perovskite optoelectronics, hence reducing the environmental impact holds the answer for its future application. To tackle this challenge, the authors utilize germanium to reduce the lead content, enabling highly luminescent eco-friendly compound for LEDs.

    • Dexin Yang
    • , Guoling Zhang
    •  & Dawei Di

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Freshwater salinisation is a growing water quality problem, but impacts and drivers across regional to global scales have been lacking. A new assessment of inter-regional freshwater salinisation demonstrates the importance of irrigation as a driver of salinisation.

    • Josefin Thorslund
    • , Marc F. P. Bierkens
    •  & Michelle T. H. van Vliet

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Microbes that colonise ice sheet surfaces are important to the carbon cycle, but their biomass and transport remains unquantified. Here, the authors reveal substantial microbial carbon fluxes across Greenland’s ice surface, in quantities that may sustain subglacial heterotrophs and fuel methanogenesis.

    • T. D. L. Irvine-Fynn
    • , A. Edwards
    •  & A. Hubbard

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Conserving mangrove biodiversity has numerous co-benefits, including climate change-mitigation. Here the authors demonstrate that blue carbon storage in mangroves can be best sustained by combining site-specific dominant species with other species with contrasting functional traits.

    • Md Mizanur Rahman
    • , Martin Zimmer
    •  & Ming Xu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Afforestation is an important greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation strategy but the efficacy of commercial (harvested) forestry is disputed. Here the authors apply dynamic life cycle assessment to show that new commercial conifer forests can achieve up to 269% more GHG mitigation than semi-natural forests, over 100 years.

    • Eilidh J. Forster
    • , John R. Healey
    •  & David Styles

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Aviation contributes to climate change and ways to reduce its emissions are widely debated. Here, the authors assess the effects of technology improvements and the use of sustainable aviation fuels and find that even when these are considered aviation is unlikely to meet emissions goals in line with the Paris Agreement.

    • Volker Grewe
    • , Arvind Gangoli Rao
    •  & Katrin Dahlmann

  • Review Article
    | Open Access

    Whether or not a city achieves absolute sustainability is difficult to assess with existing frameworks. Here the authors, in a review, show that a further integration of consumption-based accounting and benchmarking is necessary to aid the monitoring and assessment of Sustainable Development Goals in cities.

    • Thomas Wiedmann
    •  & Cameron Allen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Advanced copper supply chain modeling shows China’s new waste trade policy may increase pollution, while limiting other low-value imports reverses this trend. Here the authors show that recycling is vulnerable to supply chain shocks, requiring investment during recoveries to promote a circular economy.

    • John Ryter
    • , Xinkai Fu
    •  & Elsa A. Olivetti

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is one of the most important environmental health risk factors in many regions. Here, the authors present an assessment of PM2.5 emission sources and the related health impacts across global to sub-national scales and find that over 1 million deaths were avoidable in 2017 by eliminating PM2.5 mass associated with fossil fuel combustion emissions.

    • Erin E. McDuffie
    • , Randall V. Martin
    •  & Michael Brauer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Social inequalities may be reflected in how ecosystem services are distributed among groups of people. Here the authors estimate the distribution of three ecosystem services across demographic and socioeconomic groups in the US between 2020 and 2100, finding that non-white and lower-income groups disproportionately bear the loss of ecosystem service benefits.

    • Jesse D. Gourevitch
    • , Aura M. Alonso-Rodríguez
    •  & Taylor H. Ricketts

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The middle of the Gulf of Mexico is stratified and highly oligotrophic, yet there are anomalously high fluxes of sinking particulate matter from the euphotic zone. Here the authors show that lateral advection of organic matter supports nitrogen export in the Gulf of Mexico’s open ocean.

    • Thomas B. Kelly
    • , Angela N. Knapp
    •  & Michael R. Stukel

  • Review Article
    | Open Access

    Water scarcity is a rapidly spreading global challenge but water purification technologies are often not sustainable. Here, the authors review the research on water purification technologies based on protein nanofibrils as a green and affordable solution to alleviate a water crisis.

    • Mohammad Peydayesh
    •  & Raffaele Mezzenga

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Open fires can increase heavy exposure to hazardous particulate matters, and thus harm human health, particularly among the vulnerable individuals, such as pregnant women. Here, the authors show an association between maternal exposure to fire smoke and increased risk of pregnancy loss in South Asia.

    • Tao Xue
    • , Guannan Geng
    •  & Tong Zhu

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