Sustainability

Sustainability is essentially the ability to endure, for example by exploiting resources in a way that does not deplete their future availability or unduly damage the wider environment. This concept has been incorporated in the idea of sustainable development.

Featured

Latest Research and Reviews

All Research & Reviews

News and Comment

  • News & Views |

    Seaweed farming is gaining attention as a potential climate change mitigation solution, but how to achieve such potential is uncertain given current knowledge and practice. A study now explores how expanding seaweed farming for wider human use could reduce carbon emissions from agriculture.

    • Heidi K. Alleway
    Nature Sustainability, 1-2

  • News & Views |

    Curtailing water use during drought is costly, but those costs are not evenly distributed. Socio–hydrological modelling shows how water burdens fall more heavily on poor households in response to water conservation policies.

    • Casey J. Wichman
    Nature Water 1, 26-27

  • Comments & Opinion |

    The healthy watersheds concept links ecosystem condition with human benefits and helps decision-makers evaluate trade-offs. Implementation requires letting go of technocratic approaches, accounting for ecosystem services, embracing watersheds’ complexity and supporting participatory processes and subsidiarity.

    • Derek Vollmer
    • , Robin Abell
    •  & Nicholas Souter
    Nature Sustainability, 1-3

  • Comments & Opinion |

    The use of step count as a metric of synthetic efficiency carries opportunities and challenges. Here, proposals are made to standardize what constitutes a synthetic step and how steps are counted. These proposals may be beneficial in the holistic evaluation of published synthetic routes.

    • Jeffrey S. Johnson
    Nature Synthesis 2, 6-8
All News & Comment