Volume 6 Issue 4, April 2023

A historic treaty to protect the oceans has finally been signed off by the United Nations, can we be hopeful now?

Sustainably addressing the water needs of populations in countries lacking adequate infrastructure is challenging. We discuss the potential of decentralized water and wastewater treatment using electrified processes across Latin American countries and reflect on what would help their implementation in the region.

Anna Berti Suman is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC). She is the principal researcher of the Sensing for Justice (SensJus) project, which explores the applications of civic environmental monitoring for environmental justice.

While often perceived as being immune to adverse change, new satellite observations highlight the unexpected impacts of human activities on the world’s protected and intact forests.

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.

An aqueous electrochromic device has been developed that enables reversible tuning of its thermal emissivity with minimal electrical power input. The device allows for all-season radiative thermoregulation, leading towards year-round energy savings for buildings.

The hazardous life cycle of synthetic materials is driving sustainable materials with biogenic building blocks to play a larger role. This Perspective identifies the main challenges and suggests the way forward by focusing on food packaging.

Understanding global forces impacting forests is increasingly vital. This study finds that human factors follow climate as the most important factors affecting forest structure globally and are the dominant factor regionally, even in many protected areas and so-called intact forest landscapes.

Seaweed farming could reduce agriculture’s environmental footprint, but its potential is not well-explored yet. This study shows how globally extended aquaculture can reduce terrestrial crops demand and greenhouse gas emissions while providing a substitute or supplement for food, animal feeds and fuel.

Managing landscapes sustainably is challenging given the competing interests of different stakeholder groups. By combining broad ecological data with information on the ecosystem service priorities of multiple stakeholder groups, this study provides a tool to quantify the social impact of land-use changes.

Decarbonizing the aviation sector is difficult given travel patterns and technical and economic constraints. Through nine holistic scenarios towards net-zero emissions from aviation by 2050, this study can inform investments and priorities for innovation to achieve a more sustainable aviation sector.

Diversified renewable energy sources can enable the sustainable operation of multisector resource systems. An artificial intelligence-assisted multi-objective design framework, applied in Ghana, explores optimized management and investment strategies balancing hydropower, bioenergy, solar and wind energies, and their impacts.

Electrochromism provides a means to control transmittance of light for increased energy efficiency of buildings. Here the aqueous electrochromic design features tunable emissivity and allows for all-season radiative thermoregulation.

Dairy manure spread on crop fields leads to air and water pollution that could be mitigated through manure processing systems that capture methane to produce electricity. A recent US policy opening wholesale electricity markets to distributed energy resource systems, creates incentives to deploy manure processing systems.

Access to clean cooking is a critical issue in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). An open-source spatial tool comparing the relative potential of different cookstoves on the basis of their costs and benefits is developed and applied to SSA and shows the potential to increase the effectiveness of targeted interventions.

Nature-based solutions for climate adaptation are not comprehensively addressing the climate–biodiversity–society nexus, limiting their capacity to promote urban transformation. However, notable transformative examples of urban nature-based solutions do exist, especially in the Global South.

The impacts of air pollution on mental health have been previously documented but rarely using nationwide large-scale data. This study investigates the short-term and long-term impacts of air pollution on urbanites’ mental health by leveraging national real-time internet search data in China.