Analyses

Access to green space has been a critical, and contentious, issue for neighbourhood inequality and health outcomes. This Analysis looks at how the COVID-19 pandemic interacts with availability of nature for urban residents.

Carbon pricing can alter income distribution. With a focus on Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Philippines, Thailand, Turkey and Vietnam, this study compares four types of carbon pricing schemes and finds substantial variation in distributional effects across policy designs and countries.

Large-scale tree planting programmes have been implemented or planned for areas around the world suffering from deforestation, but this study presents evidence that such efforts may not necessarily deliver the desired environmental and economic outcomes.

Co-production includes diverse aims, terminologies and practices. This study explores such diversity by mapping differences in how 32 initiatives from 6 continents co-produce diverse outcomes for the sustainable development of ecosystems at local to global scales.

Climate change will alter the distribution of tuna, impacting the economies of Pacific Small Island Developing States. This study finds that greater greenhouse gas emissions will worsen these impacts.

Low-temperature CO₂ electrolysis is a promising process for producing renewable chemicals and fuels. This work provides a systematic techno-economic assessment of four major products, prioritizing technological development, and proposes guidelines to facilitate market adoption.

Capturing the carbon from energy crops—bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS)—requires water to grow the crops. This study finds that although unlimited irrigation could increase BECCS potential by 60–71% by 2100, doing so sustainably would increase it by only 5–6%.

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.

Southeast Asia contains half the world’s tropical mountain forests. This study finds increasing mountain forest loss there, with the clearing frontier moving higher in the 2010s and causing unprecedented carbon loss.

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.

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.

Innovations to tackle marine litter are urgently needed. A global analysis of solutions to prevent, monitor and clean marine litter identifies 177 solutions, mostly for monitoring, and shows that only a few are ready to use but none have been validated for efficiency and environmental potential.

An analysis of national economies’ unequal exposure to biocapacity constraints and purchasing power reveals how increasing demand of natural resources can lead to inescapable poverty traps.

Sustainability has been added as a ‘pillar’ of the Olympic movement, but this analysis examines each Summer and Winter Games since 1992 to find that the performance of host cities across a range of indicators has been declining over time.

Expanding energy infrastructure has been vital to China’s development plans, but has had negative consequences. This study finds that in 2017 the level of embodied greenhouse gas emissions from the expansion of China’s power transmission infrastructure increased by more than 7.3 times that in 1990.

Most of the world’s farms are small. This study finds that smaller farms have higher yields and biodiversity than larger ones but little difference in greenhouse gas emissions and profits.

Fossil fuel infrastructure impacts land use. This study estimates the present value from restoring lands with non-producing gas wells at US$21 billion at a restoration cost of US$7 billion. Deciduous forests, grasslands and chaparral had especially high net benefits.

As cannabis production becomes legalized and legitimized, its production will likely change and expand with attendant environmental impacts. This life cycle analysis of energy and material costs across the United States focuses on indoor cannabis growing operations.

The Sulitest, developed to gauge sustainability knowledge, has been given to thousands of people worldwide. This analysis evaluates the test and its role as a diagnostic tool for sustainability education.

This meta-analysis of over 2,400 papers tracks the influence of older publications that have ‘echoed’ through the decades, cited in countless publications and creating a potentially false confirmation bias.