Articles

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.

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.

Domestic strategies to increase carbon stocks in agricultural soils can lead to spillover effects in countries with less stringent policies. Thinking beyond domestic policy alone is needed for effective sustainable and climate-smart agriculture.

Understanding how community-based initiatives work is crucial for effective environmental management, but causal evaluations of these efforts are rare. This study presents a national-scale evaluation of a locally managed network of marine areas in Fiji and examines whether the expected mechanisms deliver conservation outcomes.

By reconstructing the number of farms on Earth over 1969–2013, this study shows that under current development trajectories, the number of farms globally will probably halve by the end of the twenty-first century, with a doubling of the average farm size.

The presence of toxic lead enables high photoconversion efficiency of perovskite solar cells but poses environmental and human health concerns. Here the authors address the issues by introducing a cost-effective TiO₂ absorption layer through a scalable process.

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.

Laundry detergents usually contain chemicals that are problematic to the environment. The authors introduce a polymer nanofilm that renders fabrics and many more materials stain resistant and detergent free.

Plastic pollution forms a major global challenge to the ecosystem. Here the authors show a binuclear catalyst that could degrade various polyesters in an effective and scalable way, providing a promising technological solution to the challenge.

Arid soils are currently under substantial anthropogenic stress and are globally degrading. Co-operating photovoltaic plants with biocrust nurseries has potential to restore soil health alongside renewable energy production.

Urban water crises, due to droughts and unsustainable water consumption, are becoming increasingly recurrent in metropolitan cities. This study shows the role of social inequalities in such crises, revealing the implications of water overconsumption by privileged social groups and individuals.

Oxygen electrocatalysis is at the heart of a range of clean energy technologies, but the best-performing electrocatalysts rely on precious metals. The authors demonstrate a carbon catalyst design with embedded high-entropy 3d transition metal single atoms that shows excellent catalytic activities.

Dealing with radioactive pollution first requires the detection of radioactive species released to the environment. Here the authors show an ultrasensitive and selective way to detect ⁹⁰Sr, one of the most frequently discharged products from nuclear reactors.

Rechargeable aqueous zinc batteries are heralded as a sustainable energy technology but still face technical challenges. The hybrid electrolyte here eliminates hydrogen evolution reaction, the most thorny issue, and allows for impressive battery performance even under harsh conditions.

This study uses 30-m cropland maps to show that cropland expansion in protected areas accelerated dramatically from 2000 to 2019, compared with the expansion of global croplands, threatening the aspirations of the post-2020 global biodiversity framework.

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.

Recycling forms an essential dimension of batteries’ sustainability. Here the authors show a straightforward process that directly upgrades spent LiCoO₂ to a Mg and Al co-substituted LiCoO₂ cathode with a high voltage of 4.6 V and excellent cycling stability.

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.