Articles in 2019

Promotion of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) will accompany China’s Belt and Road Initiative. This Perspective notes the potential risks and advocates open-eyed cooperation to build sustainability into this expanding TCM market.

Pesticides overuse has led to evolution of resistance but the associated crop yield losses or economic costs at large scale are not known. This study estimates the annual cost of resistance in England for black-grass and calls for national-scale planning to address the problem.

A novel method to assess the impacts of large-scale conservation interventions on household wealth while capturing local heterogeneity reveals small and variable impacts of a nationwide conservation programme in Tanzania.

Increased electricity availability has been posited as a boost for gender equity by providing women with access to appliances. However, social and household norms could mitigate this access, as this mixed-methods study investigates.

Current methods to remove oil microdroplets from wastewater are ineffective at the variable pH conditions commonly found in wastewater. This study presents a surface-engineered sponge that synergistically combines surface chemistry, charge and roughness, providing a solution to this problem.

Concentrations of glyphosate, a common herbicide, in water can be problematic due to its toxicity. Using both artificial and real water samples, this study shows the sustainability advantages of using magnetite (Fe₃O₄) nanoparticles to remove glyphosate from water.

The cascading effects and feedbacks of interactions between planetary boundaries shrink the safe operating space originally identified by analysing each boundary separately.

After a year of intense activities, the University of Virginia–Nature Sustainability Expert Panel on behavioural science for design is ready to share its main findings and eager to bring more experts on board.

Adoption of air conditioning is increasing globally, leading to peaks in electricity consumption and related environmental concerns. Compiling recent data on population and temperature, this study ranks 219 countries and 1,692 cities based on a measure of cooling demand to improve our understanding of future trends.

An international expert panel probes how engineers, architects and behavioural scientists can work together to learn about design behaviour for sustainability — and what all interested scholars and practitioners might learn from it.

Land use is one of the most contested issues facing global conservation, but degraded lands should be the focus of governments and trusts to take and conserve uncontested areas for nature.

The world is urbanizing. This Review assesses impacts of urban growth on habitat and biodiversity, finding direct impacts more in high-income countries while indirect impacts affect more land but are lesser studied.

Flooding is the costliest natural disaster. Focusing on the United States, this analysis finds that by 2070 avoided damages exceed land acquisition costs for more than one-third of unprotected natural lands in the 100-year floodplain.

The degradation and recycling of thermoset materials are major sustainability challenges. The synthesized thermoset hyperbranched polymers (HER-HT_n) reported in this study exhibit recoverability and rapid degradability in more environmentally friendly phosphoric acid solutions.

Soil erosion threatens food production and ecosystems. This study finds that soil erosion rates change significantly at national borders, probably reflecting agricultural characteristics that vary among countries.

The diversity of approaches to knowledge production can be challenging for transdisciplinary teams. This Perspective proposes a way to articulate the epistemology, methodology and implementation underpinning research.

Adequate methods are needed to study the connections among food consumption and production, energy and water, and environmental impacts. This Analysis presents a set of model-based scenarios and associated Sankey diagrams to facilitate this kind of analysis and formulate response strategies.

In light of pressing societal and environmental problems, sustainability science must advance faster than before. In order to contribute to a cumulative body of knowledge, such research needs shared infrastructure, database development and changes in research culture.

Knowing how and why households stop using solid-fuel stoves after adopting clean fuels can inform policies for energy transitions. This study shows that in China over one-third and one-fifth of participants suspended use of solid fuel for cooking and heating, respectively, during the past 20 years.