Volume 6 Issue 9, September 2023

Radiative cooling is a technology that dissipates excessive heat without energy input and could address critical sustainability issues. However, the lack of transparency and standardization for reporting of radiative cooling performance risks misgauging the true merits of reported breakthroughs. This Comment discusses the common pitfalls in performance measurement and recommends the best practices for future endeavour in favour of practical applications.

Perry L. McCarty, a pioneer in environmental biotechnology, passed away at the age of 91. His contributions to environmental engineering will live on.

Reducing greenhouse gases can benefit air quality and health overall, but the magnitude and distribution of these benefits remain uncertain. Now a study shows that while air quality gains from carbon policies are widespread, some regions could see pollution increases.

A bold study now combines rigorous ethical criteria to calculate national obligations based on each country’s level of ‘overshoot’ in appropriation of the atmosphere’s capacity to absorb carbon emissions. The findings suggest that a massive debt is owed.

Restoring coastal vegetated habitats can remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it as organic matter in sediments. A study now shows that these habitats also support seawater to store more carbon, and for longer, in its dissolved inorganic form.

This study shows how a form of olfactory misinformation (odour camouflage) on a newly sown wheat crop can prevent wild house mice from finding buried seeds, substantially reducing seed loss in an ethical way.

Natural resource extraction often involves violence against environmental defenders, but threats to women defenders tend to be poorly documented. This study analyses displacement, repression, criminalization, violent targeting and assassinations of women environmental defenders worldwide.

More efficient and targeted climate mitigation policies require an improved understanding of how the associated air quality and health benefits will be distributed. This study assesses, at the country level, the health effects of a global carbon price under different future scenarios.

Although key to reducing transport greenhouse gas emissions, not much is known about city-level policies globally. With a spatially explicit monocentric urban economic model, this study analyses the impact of four representative policies to mitigate transport greenhouse gas emissions across 120 cities worldwide.

Some countries are disproportionately responsible for climate change damages and should compensate those remaining within fair shares of the 1.5 °C carbon budget. This study presents a procedure to quantify the level of compensation owed in a ‘net zero’ scenario where all countries decarbonize by 2050.

Blue carbon ecosystems, such as seagrass meadows and mangrove forests, provide myriad ecosystem services and their restoration has gained global attention. Via enhanced ocean alkalinity, restoring these ecosystems can also promote durable carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere.

Monitoring of gas flaring (GF) can be expensive and practically difficult, but better information about global offshore GF is needed to inform decarbonization policies. This study presents a monitoring framework, a detailed inventory of offshore GF sites and estimates of GF volumes globally.

Sourcing rare earth elements (REEs) from unconventional feedstocks has substantial environmental and societal–economic benefits. Here the authors develop tools to evaluate the economic viability of unconventional REE feedstocks to facilitate the implementation of a sustainable REE supply.

The impacts of biological invasions may be unevenly distributed globally, with a few regions bearing most of the cost. This study identifies cost distributions of invasions among origin and recipient countries and continents, and determines socio-economic and environmental predictors of cost dynamics.

A global meta-analysis examines concurrent soil organic carbon (SOC) and yield responses—including their direct connection—to cover cropping and suggests that targeting cover crops on low-carbon soils can lead to direct yield benefits from SOC increases.