Articles in 2023

Prescribed burning is a common tool to mitigate the risk of dangerous wildfires. However, careful consideration of the public health impacts should be incorporated into forest management plans.

Ammonia recovery from manure wastewater not only protects the aquatic ecosystem but also contributes to a sustainable nutrient cycle. Here the authors develop an electrochemical process enabling efficient ammonia recovery, with decentralized fertilizer and chemical production, from ammonia-rich manure wastewater.

This study examines productivity and workforce dynamics in the world’s fisheries over six decades, finding that the natural limits of fish stocks combined with technological advances have led to diminishing returns per fisher.

Facilities that store the waste and tailings of mining operations pose a salient threat to biodiversity. Despite international consensus to mitigate mining impacts on local ecosystems, globally, nearly 10% of facilities are located within protected areas and another 20% can be found within 5 km of their boundaries.

In the context of climate change, the discourse of capacity building may reproduce colonial power dynamics by framing adaptation failures as the responsibility of marginalized communities. “Capacity sharing” offers an alternative paradigm for a more environmentally just and decolonial approach to managing local climate risks.

Water consumption in line with natural water supply ensures sustainable and equitable access to freshwater resources worldwide. This study assesses whether renewable surface water is enough to meet people’s basic needs and, where it is not, estimates how much groundwater would be required.

As political institutions debate environmental policies, this paper reveals how some members of the European Parliament think about underlying principles of degrowth versus more traditional ‘green’ and economic growth platforms.

Adopting technological solutions for water management without considering the complexity underlying human–water interactions can result in unintended consequences. Now a systems meta-model offers a tool to reveal critical human–water links and guide coordinated solutions for sustainable water management.

Veera Mitzner, Director of the Sustainability Research & Innovation (SRI) Congress and Associate Director of Future Earth US Global Hub, and Omar R. López Alfano, Director of the National Research System, SENACYT, Panama, and President of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research, talk to Nature Sustainability about the success and prospects of the SRI Congress.

Theories of change have been a staple of sustainability research, but how to connect such overarching concepts to actionable items can be a struggle. This study uses coastal wetlands to demonstrate a potential framework for integrating indicators of conservation enabling conditions into theories of change.

The agricultural production of food comes with substantial greenhouse gas emissions and impacts on the environment. Dietary fats, a staple of human diet, might be produced chemosynthetically with a fraction of the detrimental effects on the environment.

While most conservation efforts rightfully focus on the percentage of protected land, this paper analyses how the size and complexity of protected area boundaries affects the remoteness of internal areas and the contiguity of protected natural ecosystems

Gold mining has a substantial impact on the surrounding environment, especially in terms of mercury release and high energy consumption. Retorts have reduced the magnitude of mercury emissions in the Brazilian Tapajós River basin, but gold mining still releases 16,000 kg of CO₂ equivalent per kilogram of gold.

Human changes to freshwater flows affect marine ecosystems, but such impacts are rarely considered in development plans involving dam building and water abstraction from rivers. Now research shows how approaches that integrate flow management and marine fisheries can improve both freshwater and coastal ecosystem sustainability.

Water resource development can have important downstream impacts on ecological functioning and affect socio-economic outcomes associated with marine fisheries. This study modelled the catchment-to-coast effects of reductions in freshwater flowing to estuaries in Australia.

Quantifications of the impacts of sea-level rise in small island states are urgently needed. Focusing on flooding from sea-level rise, a study now estimates the impacts in terms of cost, land loss and population exposure across all small islands worldwide.

End-of-life plastics conversion is crucial to reduce plastic pollution and realize a circular economy, argues Ding Ma.

Plastics are ubiquitous, but problematic from a whole life cycle perspective. Nature Sustainability asked four experts to present their views about the ongoing plastics crisis.

Policy making is entering a phase of more transformative strategies targeting the full life cycle of plastics, argues Patrick Schröder.