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Orchestrating a global transition to a sustainable world economy seems both urgent and surpassingly daunting. J.R. McNeill asks whether there is a workaround.
Contamination of the environment with plastics is one of the most widespread and long-lasting human influences on our planet. There is an urgent need to comprehensively evaluate the environmental plastics cycle and advance understanding of key transport and fate mechanisms to minimize human exposure to plastics pollution.
In the coming months, Nature Sustainability will be publishing a series of World Views from diverse scholars to stimulate further thinking and dialogue within the community.
Water research has fallen into a ‘techno optimism’ that tries to solve all problems despite not asking fundamental questions, according to Stephanie Pincetl of the University of California, Los Angeles. She talks to Nature Sustainability about the challenges facing the field and science writ large.
Dr Shailja Vaidya Gupta is Senior Adviser at the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India. She tells Nature Sustainability about the challenges of climate negotiations from her country’s perspective, views are her own.
Our food system reflects and affects our values. Recognizing and understanding the power of those often unstated value systems is critical for avoiding a range of disasters.
Rain and drought have seized the world’s attention, showing the importance of water studies for society. But what if the field is not pursuing the most critical research?
Multiple policy tools are needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Åsa Persson, from the Stockholm Environment Institute and a member of the Independent Group of Scientists working on the 2023 United Nations Global Sustainable Development Report, speaks to Nature Sustainability about the complexity of research comparing the impacts of policy instruments.
Nature Sustainability welcomes research comparing the performance of environmental policy instruments to better inform the choice of policies and ultimately help to bridge the science–policy gap.
Natural capital accounting will confirm what we know — without change, we are headed for environmental disaster resulting from economic growth. We propose a natural capital bank, a new institution to help maintain natural capital adequacy and chart a course to a sustainable future via accounting.
Scientific evidence sheds light on the extent, source and type of litter in the oceans, as well as on the limited efforts to clean it up so far. As we rely on healthy oceans for our future, it’s time to act.
