Research articles

Nearly half of drifting fish aggregating devices in the Indian and Atlantic oceans becomes abandoned, lost or discarded. However, a substantial portion of this pollution passes near major ports, hence port-based recovery presents a promising strategy to reduce fishing-related marine pollution.

Hydrologic data collected from river gauges inform critical decisions for allocating water resources, conserving ecosystems and predicting the occurrence of droughts and floods. The current global river gauge network is biased towards large, perennial rivers, and strategic adaptations are needed to capture the full scope of rivers on Earth.

Punishment to enforce cooperation is common in human societies, but attitudes towards punishment might not survive natural selection as punishers do not seem to gain from the process. This study shows that, when the institution-choice process and the scale of the goods being preserved are aligned, costly punishment institutions can be adopted and maintained.

Deforestation caused by oil palm plantations is threatening biomass carbon sequestration across the tropics. Although large-scale plantations dominate this expansion, smallholder operations responding to high export prices are preferentially eating into mature, carbon-rich forests that promise high yields.

The 2016 peace agreement in Colombia led to agricultural expansion to the detriment of biodiversity. Using Colombia as a case study, this work shows how to maximize the biodiversity benefits from limited conservation funding while landowners maintain economic returns equivalent to those from agriculture.

The sheer scale of global development aid projects and funding can be almost impenetrable for researchers and policymakers to derive broad trends, let alone specific topics. This machine learning analysis looks at 3.2 million separate aid activities over the past two decades to find clusters and categories for better targeting of development funds.

Minority groups are often disproportionately exposed to air pollution, but what drives these disparities is difficult to analyse. Using the economic shutdown associated with the 2020 COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders, this study estimates pollution exposure disparities caused by the in-person economy in California.

Poor availability and access to clean water is a fundamental sustainability challenge facing our society. Here the authors show that covalent organic framework membranes enable excellent performance in seawater desalination including high permeation flux and fouling resistance, providing a promising technological solution.

The environmental effectiveness of procurement incentives for electric vehicle (EV) sales depends on the behaviour of EV adopters. This study explores such a relationship and how procurement policies should be designed in order to achieve emissions reduction and be economically efficient.

Fishing practices and efficiency at catching fish vary across individual operators with implications about the operators’ ability to avoid bycatch. This study analyses variations in threatened species bycatch among individual operators from industrial fisheries across different geographic areas, gear types and target species

A study of how sustainable fruit harvesting in Amazon peatlands can support livelihoods and aid efforts to mitigate climate change.

Controlled use of fire for subsistence and smallholder livelihoods has undoubtedly shaped ecosystems but we have limited research on the practices and extent. This analysis of nearly 600 case study locations finds fire use is changing in ways that could pose risks to smallholder livelihoods as well as wildlife and biodiversity.

The development of innovative packaging materials could contribute to greater sustainability in the food and beverage industry. Here the authors report squid-skin-inspired metallized composite materials that show adaptive infrared and dynamic thermoregulatory properties, and could be manufactured in a scalable way.

Assessing the effectiveness of restoration projects faces challenges due to operational issues and the high costs of gathering on-ground data. This study combines satellite observations with quasi-experimental methods to examine the impacts of the Sustainable Land Management Project in Ethiopia.

Sand for building material is a vital but increasingly scarce resource. Demand for sand is projected to increase substantially in the coming decades, particularly in lower-income countries. Strategic modifications to building practices, however, can reduce global building sand demand by up to 50%.

SDG interactions have been a focus of research for some time now, and this analysis finds a dynamic and nonlinear change in how the SDGs interact with each other as a nation progresses towards sustainability.

Artificial intelligence methods can help biodiversity conservation planning in a rapidly evolving world. A framework based on reinforcement learning quantifies the trade-off between the costs and benefits of area and biodiversity protection and achieves better solutions with empirical data than alternative methods.

Modelling studies suggest that large-scale win–win solutions are available, but practitioners confronted with real-world complexity are sceptical. This study shows that increasing the number of objectives, the number of stakeholders or the number of constraints decreases the availability of win–win outcomes.

Superblocks have captivated the sustainability community since they were pioneered in Barcelona, but research has been limited. This study looks at the potential for superblocks and miniblocks across various urban centres and types

Despite the growing use of biodiversity offsets from major industrial projects, little is known about how effective they are. This study shows that the offsets associated with the Ambatovy mine in Madagascar trying to compensate for deforestation at the mine site are on track to achieve no net loss of forest.