Environmental social sciences articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Current desalination technologies are energy intensive and suffer from membrane degradation and fouling. Here, authors propose and explore the potential of thermodiffusion as a means of membrane-free, single-phase thermal desalination. A pathway towards a feasible thermodiffusive desalination is provided.

    • Shuqi Xu
    • , Alice J. Hutchinson
    •  & Juan F. Torres

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Setting goals that are context-specific, relevant, and collectively shared is critical in adaptation. As necessary elements in target setting, imaginaries for adaptation and the language connected to them remain vague. Visuals produced through art-science collaborations can be great allies to (de)construct imaginaries and deglobalise discourses of adaptation.

    • Marta Olazabal
    • , Maria Loroño-Leturiondo
    •  & Josune Urrutia

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The effectiveness of community-based land protection compared to traditional top-down protection is debated. Here, the authors show that both community-managed forests and traditional protected areas in Madagascar experienced deforestation during a political crisis but the former were especially vulnerable in the post-crisis period.

    • Rachel A. Neugarten
    • , Ranaivo A. Rasolofoson
    •  & Amanda D. Rodewald

  • Perspective
    | Open Access

    Engineering biology is a dynamic field that uses gene editing, synthesis, assembly, and engineering to design new or modified biological systems. Here the authors discuss the policy considerations and interventions needed to support a role for engineering biology in climate change mitigation.

    • Jonathan Symons
    • , Thomas A. Dixon
    •  & Isak S. Pretorius

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study demonstrates how land-based carbon removals and the market-mediated responses are sensitive to mitigation policy strength and scope, illustrating that, despite trade-offs, both forestation and BECCS are integral to cost-effective 2 °C pathways.

    • Xin Zhao
    • , Bryan K. Mignone
    •  & Haewon C. McJeon

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The global atlas of unburnable oil shows that the most socio-environmentally sensitive areas, such as protected areas or biodiversity hotspots, need to be kept entirely off-limits to oil extraction in order to keep global warming under 1.5 °C.

    • Lorenzo Pellegrini
    • , Murat Arsel
    •  & Martí Orta-Martínez

  • Article
    | Open Access

    China’s use of coal is complex to establish a clean and low-carbon transition for the country. With an uncertainty assessment framework, this study displays the risks of missing opportunities in obtaining cumulative positive net benefits and identifying an optimal transition strategy.

    • Xizhe Yan
    • , Dan Tong
    •  & Yu Lei

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Building renovation is an urgent requirement to reduce the environmental impact associated with the building stock. In this paper, authors identify strategies for robust renovation considering uncertainties on the future and provide recommendations for the residential buildings in Switzerland.

    • Alina Galimshina
    • , Maliki Moustapha
    •  & Guillaume Habert

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Subsidies for coastal management and tax advantages for high-income property owners dampen the negative effects of climate risks on coastal property values. Without subsidies or tax advantages market prices better reflect climate risks, but coastal gentrification could accelerate.

    • Dylan E. McNamara
    • , Martin D. Smith
    •  & Craig E. Landry

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Conventional blue denim dyeing has both environmental and health-related consequences. Here, Bidart et al. use enzyme engineering to develop a viable method for the bulk production of indican and demonstrate dying processes which could significantly reduce the negative consequences of this billion-dollar industry.

    • Gonzalo Nahuel Bidart
    • , David Teze
    •  & Ditte Hededam Welner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Xu and colleagues find that the average trophic level of aquatic food items in the human diet is declining (from 3.42 to 3.18) because of the considerable increase in low-trophic level aquaculture species output relative to that of capture fisheries since 1976. Additionally they find that trade has contributed to increasing the availability and trophic level of aquatic foods in >60% of the world’s countries.

    • Kangshun Zhao
    • , Steven D. Gaines
    •  & Jun Xu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Towards optimizing the conjunctive operation of surface and groundwater resources in arid and semi-arid regions, here the authors propose a hybrid method involving moth-swarm and symbiotic organism search algorithms and artificial neural networks and demonstrate it for the HalīlRood basin.

    • Saeid Akbarifard
    • , Mohamad Reza Madadi
    •  & Mohammad Zounemat-Kermani

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Domestic attempts to advance the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in a country can have synergistic and/or trade-off effects on the advancement of SDGs in other countries. Here the authors demonstrate that while high-income countries make up only 14% of the global population, they drive over 60% of worldwide SDG interactions.

    • Huijuan Xiao
    • , Sheng Bao
    •  & Jianguo Liu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In a first global analysis, researchers find that sandy shores are severely squeezed between human infrastructure and the rising sea, as on average, the first road or building is currently situated at just 390 meters distance from the shoreline.

    • Eva M. Lansu
    • , Valérie C. Reijers
    •  & Tjisse van der Heide

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here the authors demonstrate how managed urbanization in China could halve reactive nitrogen pollution to both the atmosphere and water resources. Investing 61 billion USD could provide 245 billion USD in benefits, while contributing to multiple SDG goals.

    • Ouping Deng
    • , Sitong Wang
    •  & Baojing Gu

  • Editorial
    | Open Access

    Climate change is exacerbating challenges both for global food production and from its environmental impacts. Sustainable and socially responsible solutions for future world-wide food security are urgently needed.

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Flooding impacts billions globally and indirect health effects are not sufficiently examined, especially for women in developing countries. Here, the authors show that flood exposure during pregnancy correlates with a higher risk of pregnancy loss, particularly for marginalized women, revealing increased health disparities in a changing climate.

    • Cheng He
    • , Yixiang Zhu
    •  & Haidong Kan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The growth in global milk demand has been accompanied by an increase in waste milk disposal. Here, the authors transform waste milk through humification and incorporate the product into attapulgite creating a nano-fertiliser that benefits for plants growing in pots.

    • Yanping Zhu
    • , Yuxuan Cao
    •  & Dongqing Cai

  • Q&A
    | Open Access

    Summary: Cultivated or cultured meat is promising to revolutionize the food industry in the coming years to decades, helping to resolve concerns related to the environmental impact and ethical implications linked to conventional meat production. We talked to Dr. Sandhya Sriram, the Group CEO and Co-founder of Shiok Meats Pte. Ltd., Singapore; Prof. Shulamit Levenberg, the former Dean of the Biomedical Engineering Department at the Technion, current Director of the Technion Center for 3D Bioprinting and The Rina & Avner Schneur Center for Diabetes Research, as well as the Co-founder and Chief Scientific Adviser of Aleph Farms, Israel; and Dr. Timothy Olsen, Head of Cultured Meat in the Life Science business at Merck KGaA, Germany; about this relatively new and quickly developing sector. They explain what their teams are working on, including the biggest recent accomplishments, speak about the main challenges facing the field and how they can be resolved, and share their visions about the future of cultivated meat, aiming to provide more equitable and sustainable access to nutritious food for the growing world population.

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The geographic distribution of dengue has been expanding in recent decades, and Vietnam is one of the most severely affected countries. In this study, the authors use Bayesian hierarchical modelling to investigate the socio-environmental and climatic drivers of dengue incidence in Vietnam and how they vary across the country.

    • Rory Gibb
    • , Felipe J. Colón-González
    •  & Rachel Lowe

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The coal chemical sector uses coal to produce chemicals and emits substantial greenhouse gases, which are hard to abate by electrification alone. Deploying green H2 for China’s coal chemical plants can reduce ~50% of emissions at a low cost.

    • Yang Guo
    • , Liqun Peng
    •  & Denise L. Mauzerall

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ronco and colleagues analyze disaster-induced movements in the presence of floods, storms, and landslides during 2016–2021, providing empirical evidence that differential vulnerability exists and quantifying its extent. They achieve this by employing explainable machine learning techniques to model and understand internal displacement flows and patterns from observational data.

    • Michele Ronco
    • , José María Tárraga
    •  & Gustau Camps-Valls

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The estimates of the societal costs of carbon currently used for policy evaluations may be too low due to an insufficient representation of tropical cyclone damage. Accounting for them substantially increases the estimated benefits of climate change mitigation measures.

    • Hazem Krichene
    • , Thomas Vogt
    •  & Christian Otto

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study finds that flood insurance policy design affects economic development in floodplains and, consequently, flood risk in Europe. Therefore, the authors advocate for flood insurance design to be integrated in climate change adaptation policy.

    • Max Tesselaar
    • , W. J. Wouter Botzen
    •  & Jeroen C. J. H. Aerts

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Englander and Costello note that African coastal waters are among the world’s most biologically rich, but African countries earn much less than their peers from selling access to foreign fishers. They find forming a “fish cartel" would increase African fish biomass by 16% and profits by 23%.

    • Gabriel Englander
    •  & Christopher Costello

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors map beliefs in climate change and their correlates in Latin America. The study shows skepticism over the existence and anthropogenic origins of climate change to be limited, but identifies a high number of skeptics around the severity of its consequences. Results also show individualistic worldviews to be the most powerful driver of climate change beliefs in the region.

    • Matias Spektor
    • , Guilherme N. Fasolin
    •  & Juliana Camargo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Green technologies foster the use of green energy; however, large investment costs hinder adoption. In a large-scale field experiment, the authors show that message framing can promote a serious commitment to solar panels among the broader public.

    • Dominik Bär
    • , Stefan Feuerriegel
    •  & Markus Weinmann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Rapid adoption of zero-emission vehicles with a concurrent transition to clean electricity is essential to achieve U.S. transportation decarbonization goals. Managing travel demand can ease this transition by reducing the need for clean electricity supply. @cghoehne, @nrel, #NRELMobility

    • Christopher Hoehne
    • , Matteo Muratori
    •  & Ookie Ma

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