Articles

Understanding the drivers of forest losses and their economic implications is key to designing efficient climate policies. This study simulates market-driven land-use decisions to identify the factors contributing to forest losses, revealing such losses, their trends, temporal variation and social value.

The Rotterdam Convention addresses the international trade of hazardous chemicals, but its effectiveness is rarely evaluated. This study analyses international trade flows of highly hazardous chemicals covered by the Convention, revealing that large-scale illegal trade continues to have disastrous impacts.

The authors deploy a hydrotropic solubilization strategy turning an otherwise poorly water-soluble acetate into a salt for a high-concentration aqueous electrolyte that features low cost and environmental sustainability and enables good performance of zinc batteries.

Exposure to wildfires is increasing across the continental United States. These risks are growing not only for populations living at the wildland–urban interface but also for critical infrastructure, such as roads and transmission lines.

While the type of vehicles matters a great deal for the quantity of emissions being generated, driver behaviour is also a major factor. This paper uses driving trajectory data to project how much carbon in the atmosphere could be prevented through calm driving through 2050.

Energy efficient brick production is crucial for the carbon footprint, especially in countries with a continuously expanding built environment. This study models Indian brick production and reveals a large underreporting in official energy consumption estimates, as well as key drivers affecting its performance.

Global aquatic foods are a key source of nutrition, but how their production is influenced by anthropogenic environmental changes is not well known. The vulnerability of global blue food systems to main environmental stressors and the related spatial impacts across blue food nations are now quantified.

Whether or not marine protected areas (MPAs) deliver positive outcomes for both people and nature remains a challenging question. Using a statistical matching approach, this study provides quantitative evidence of co-benefits for fish and people associated with MPAs in the Mesoamerican region.

Current understanding of how the cropland nitrogen cycle will respond to elevated atmospheric CO₂ is limited. By modelling global nitrogen budgets under elevated CO₂ and providing a monetized impact assessment, this study shows the synergistic effects of elevated CO₂ alone on global croplands.

Chemical upcycling of polyolefin plastic waste over metal-based catalysts is crucial for the circular economy, but currently available methods are incompatible with chlorine-contaminated feedstocks. Here the authors propose a two-stage dechlorination–hydrogenolysis (or hydrocracking) upcycling strategy to tackle this problem.

Current models, based on incremental changes in a single stress, have limited ability to anticipate abrupt ecosystem changes due to climate and human activities. Experiments on four models simulating ecosystems with a range of anthropogenic interactions show how much earlier abrupt change can happen.

A more in-depth understanding of the link between biodiversity and human well-being can help the design of nature-based public health interventions. This study analyses a database of species’ effect traits (colours, sounds and smells) and the diverse well-being responses that they generate.

Food production stability depends on yield, and planted and harvested areas, but most research has only studied yield response to climate. This study finds that planted area and harvestable fraction contribute substantially to US crop production shocks, emphasizing their key role in food system stability.

Despite fishing-induced biomass depletion on coral reefs, fisheries persist. This study presents a framework to evaluate potential reef fisheries productivity across a major fishing pressure gradient and shows evidence of compensatory ecological responses triggered by fishing on coral reefs.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Rising costs have recently reduced local governments’ efforts to collect recyclables from households, but this study shows that kerb-side recycling should be reconsidered as it can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and be a very cost-effective climate change mitigation strategy.

As an alternative to monetary estimates, this study expresses the costs of climate change in terms of numbers of people left outside the ‘human climate niche’, which reflects the historically highly conserved distribution of human population density relative to mean annual temperature.