Articles in 2019

Modelling the network of power plants that supply a given city, and the amount of energy drawn from each plant, shows a city’s energy mix and demonstrates which other cities it shares most energy suppliers with.

Protected areas are vital for conserving biodiversity, but limited funds must be allocated between acquiring new areas and managing existing ones. Using a landscape model, this study finds that management is often the better first investment and is always a necessary complement to acquisition.

While regional and planetary biodiversity is suffering from numerous crises, conservation movements have struggled with how to respond. At this inflection point for conservation, over 9,000 conservationists are surveyed to analyse their views and how these are predicted by their characteristics.

An environmentally friendly behaviour is more likely to motivate a second such behaviour when both actions are similar and when the first behaviour is intrinsically motivated, according to a review of the literature.

Machine learning and satellite images are used to identify intensive animal agricultural facilities in the United States, which are otherwise difficult to track. This can facilitate monitoring their compliance with environmental law.

Agriculture sustains a large and growing human population, but generates widespread impacts. This study assesses the health effects of air pollution caused by maize production. Reduced air quality leads to 4,300 premature deaths annually in the United States, akin to US$39 billion in damages, and climate change damages of US$4.9 billion.

The movement of goods links consumers and producers of natural resources in a web of interactions. This study finds that the resilience of a food trade network depends on interconnectedness and that the increasing connectivity of global food trade is making it less resilient, including to supply shocks.

Drylands cover over 40% of Earth’s surface and will probably expand with warming climates. This study found that metallic micronutrients, essential for life, are low in dryland soils globally and are affected negatively by aridity, a threat to ecosystems and food production going forward.

‘Eating organic’ requires farming differently. Organic agriculture manages crop varieties and rotations to manage pests and nutrients. This study analyses different scenarios of organic conversion, finding that a smaller area worldwide planted with wheat, rice and maize must be offset by more nitrogen-fixing crops, such as beans, alfalfa and clover. Even then, caloric energy would fall by about 27% from current production.

Shipments of natural resources and goods connect distant regions but sometimes move more than their intended cargo. This study models the growth of the global shipping network and the implications for spreading invasive species in a changing climate, forecasting substantial increases in ship movements and a 3- to 20-fold increase in invasion risk in coming decades.

Despite Antarctica’s reputation for being pristine, the construction and footprint of research stations and activities favours its relatively small regions without ice. This study uses GIS mapping of satellite imagery to quantify the extent of these impacts and finds that they impact more than half of all large coastal ice-free areas.

Biodiversity enhances the resilience of ecosystems to environmental change. This study uses an agent-based model seeded with data from Swiss mountain-farming communities to show that the diversity of actors, such as farmers, enhances the resilience of social-environmental systems to economic and climate change.

Water constraints can affect plans to expand electricity capacity. This study shows that in the United States such constraints can increase the cost of electricity generation with slightly reduced electrification of end-use sectors, and can incentivize early retirement of water-intensive technologies.

Air pollution harms human and ecosystem health and challenges sustainable development accompanying industrial activity. Winter air pollution in Delhi is extreme, and most assume that this megacity and others create their own pollution. This study uses new methods to fingerprint this pollution, finding that rural crop and wood burning contribute substantially to Delhi’s winter haze.

Indigenous agroecosystems often balance food production with environmental concerns better than industrial approaches, but they are rarely considered for meeting modern food needs. This study uses spatial models and climate scenarios to find indigenous production in Hawaiʻi’s past could meet significant population demands then and, potentially, now, but with lower capacity in the warmest end-of-century scenario.

Since the early 1980s, remotely sensed data has shown the Earth to be slowly greening. Climate change, CO₂ fertilization and land-use change are competing explanations. Using satellite data from 2000–2017, this study finds striking greening of both China and India, driven primarily by land-use change, with forest growth and cropland intensification more important in China and cropland more important in India.

Coal power generation contributes greenhouse gas and toxic air pollution worldwide. This study provides the most comprehensive analysis of such air pollution, analysing data on 7,861 coal-generating units and their supply chains. China, the United States, India, Germany and Russia contribute the most, and pollutant exposure risks are highest in India and China, but for differing reasons.

Per-capita freight in the United States has been increasing in recent decades. This study presents projections to 2050 to examine the emissions, and health and climate impacts of US freight truck and rail transportation under various policy scenarios.

Offshore mariculture could promote food security and economic development while sparing wild fisheries. This model-based study finds that the Caribbean could produce over 40 million metric tons of cobia (Rachycentron canadum), about half as much as the current global wild fish catch, and in less than 1.5% of the study area.

To achieve both biodiversity conservation and timber production in tropical forests, this modelling study finds that improved management has much more impact than the choice between sparing forests or sharing forest land for both purposes.