Volume 4 Issue 9, September 2021

A Global Pact for the Environment is gathering pace to become a binding international agreement. Yann Aguila, Sciences Po, and Jorge Viñuales, University of Cambridge, talk to Nature Sustainability about its global significance and potential, and about the importance of social support to make it happen.

Private cars are valued not just for their functionality but also for the freedom, autonomy or status they offer. New research quantifies the value individuals assign to car ownership and shows that more than half of it derives from non-use value.

Perovskite solar cell modules are expected to enter the market in the near future, but their implications in terms of sustainability compared to other photovoltaic devices are still debated. Now a study lays the groundwork for their eco-design.

The transfer of public funds between governments within a country based on ecological indicators is an emerging tool in environmental policy. A review of extant and proposed schemes identifies challenges and opportunities to expand the use of this instrument.

Not all meat sources have equal climate and environmental impacts, leading to hopes that fish and chicken could ‘displace’ red meat. However, this analysis of five decades of international data casts doubt that such a substitution effect is happening, and that instead all meat consumption is rising.

A choice experiment shows that perceived benefits of vehicle ownership, including non-use values such as schedule flexibility and status in addition to the transport value, are on average larger than their private costs.

An analysis of the German bioeconomy between 2000 and 2015 finds that its environmental footprints are dominated by animal-based food consumption, and agricultural land use for consumption abroad is double the domestic one.

Deforestation is often driven by land conversion for growing commodity crops. This study finds that, between 2000 and 2019, most soybean expansion in South America was on pastures converted originally for cattle production, especially in the Brazilian Amazon. More soy-driven deforestation occurred in the Brazilian Cerrado.

The authors show how untreated wastewater laced with microplastics and raw sewage is routinely discharged into UK river flows that are too low to disperse the microplastics downstream. This discharge creates acute microplastic contamination of river beds that threatens biodiversity and the quality of riverine habitats.

Disaster risks are a critical area for research, but while the focus has been on man-made adaptation, this analysis of 529 studies compiles evidence for how ecosystems can mitigate hazard vulnerabilities.

The Chinese government’s interventions to curb emissions from iron and steel production have not been evaluated. This study develops hourly, facility-level emissions estimates to assess the effects of strengthened emissions standards on pollution from China’s iron and steel industry.

Effective recycling of worn-out perovskite photovoltaic modules could improve their energy and environmental sustainability. The authors perform holistic life cycle assessments of selected solar cell architectures and provide guidelines for their future design.