Volume 6 Issue 6, June 2023

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a prominent methodology for evaluating potential environmental impacts of products throughout their entire lifespan. However, LCA studies often lack transparency and comparability, limiting their significance. Here, recommendations for best practices for LCA are provided, exemplified by its application to batteries.

The world’s largest deltas, home to numerous megacities, are expected to bear the brunt of climate-driven sea-level rise. Now, a study shows that disentangling the human impacts on the Mississippi Delta in the past century can help make these systems more resilient.

Regulating the temperature inside buildings takes a huge amount of energy, but this cost can be reduced with a smart, durable building envelope that can adapt to different temperatures for heat loss control.

A varied repertoire of responses helps manage fluctuations, as in markets. This Perspective argues that society needs to strengthen the diversity of options for responding to disruptions, exploring how this response diversity is expressed, how it can be built and lost, and what we can do to promote it.

Biophysical boundaries are not inherently just. A collaboration between social and natural scientists, the Earth Commission, defines and operationalizes Earth system justice to ensure that biophysical boundaries reduce harm, increase well-being, and reflect substantive and procedural justice.

The US Inflation Reduction Act sets that in 2027, for an electric vehicle to be tax-credit eligible, 80% of the market value of critical minerals in its battery must be sourced domestically, from US free-trade partners or from North American recycling. The viability of the target is evaluated for different battery chemistries.

Coastal deltas around the world have been losing land and disagreement on the extent of anthropogenic causes is rife. A balanced sediment budget for the Mississippi River Delta shows that the impact of levees and resource extraction have been the dominant drivers of land loss within Barataria Basin.

Vector-borne diseases are highly responsive to environmental changes, but such responses are difficult to isolate. Using human footprint index and machine learning, this study shows how the occurrence of six diverse vector-borne diseases responds to the intricate effects of human pressure.

The impacts on soil degradation of the massive land-use conversion of South American Pampa grasslands to agriculture are not well documented. This study estimates, over the period 1982–2019, the impacts of such conversion on the sediment cascade and how soil and water resources are affected as a result.

Intensifying agriculture can, in theory, spare nature from agricultural expansion. This study finds that intensification is not sparing tropical dry forests generally, but is in areas with widespread Indigenous land stewardship.

A full factorial experiment in a state-owned industrial oil palm plantation in Indonesia evaluates whether reduced management via reduced fertilization rates and mechanical weeding can decrease the negative impacts on ecosystem functions and biodiversity while maintaining profitability of the plantation.

Sustaining marine biodiversity and socio-ecological systems requires strategic planning. This study finds that a bioregional planning approach can protect representative environments in the Southern Ocean given the political will to iteratively adapt existing and proposed Marine Protected Areas.

Over-exploited fish stocks drive evolutionary changes towards smaller maturation size and lower growth rates of individual fish. Coupling economic decision-making with eco-evolutionary fish population dynamics, the impact of alternative planning horizons on evolution and profit–conservation trade-offs are evaluated.

Biodegradation of polyesters such as polylactic acid (PLA), which could serve as a carbon source for value-added chemicals, leads to CO₂ emissions. Here the authors develop a two-step catalytic process to convert PLA into methyl methacrylate, a key building-block molecule, for sustainable valorization of waste PLA.