Research articles

Despite concern among racially minoritized groups about environmental impacts within their communities, students of colour remain underrepresented in environmental science degree programmes in the United States and Europe. This study examines the experiences of students of colour to illuminate pathways to racial equity in the pursuit of sustainability.

Co-production includes diverse aims, terminologies and practices. This study explores such diversity by mapping differences in how 32 initiatives from 6 continents co-produce diverse outcomes for the sustainable development of ecosystems at local to global scales.

Climate change will alter the distribution of tuna, impacting the economies of Pacific Small Island Developing States. This study finds that greater greenhouse gas emissions will worsen these impacts.

A quantification of PM_2.5 pollution finds that mortality risk lies disproportionately within low-income households, and that addressing their indoor air pollution sources can avert more absolute deaths, yet wealthier individuals are more responsible for the emissions.

A longitudinal cohort study shows a positive effect of exposure to woodland in urban areas on cognitive development and emotional and behavioural well-being in children, but no effect of blue space or grassland.

Low-temperature CO₂ electrolysis is a promising process for producing renewable chemicals and fuels. This work provides a systematic techno-economic assessment of four major products, prioritizing technological development, and proposes guidelines to facilitate market adoption.

Urea is one the most-used synthetic nitrogen fertilizers that have been key to feeding a growing population. However, its production is energy intensive. Here, the authors show an electrocatalytic approach that allows for selective urea synthesis from nitrate and carbon dioxide at ambient conditions.

Eco-friendly processing of plastics could leverage the advantages of plastics while maximizing their environmental sustainability. Here the authors show a cellulose cinnamate polymer that could be repeatedly programmed into various 2D or 3D stable shapes through a sustainable hydrosetting process.

Capturing the carbon from energy crops—bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS)—requires water to grow the crops. This study finds that although unlimited irrigation could increase BECCS potential by 60–71% by 2100, doing so sustainably would increase it by only 5–6%.

Disaster risks are a critical area for research, but while the focus has been on man-made adaptation, this analysis of 529 studies compiles evidence for how ecosystems can mitigate hazard vulnerabilities.

Southeast Asia contains half the world’s tropical mountain forests. This study finds increasing mountain forest loss there, with the clearing frontier moving higher in the 2010s and causing unprecedented carbon loss.

Effective recycling of worn-out perovskite photovoltaic modules could improve their energy and environmental sustainability. The authors perform holistic life cycle assessments of selected solar cell architectures and provide guidelines for their future design.

The Chinese government’s interventions to curb emissions from iron and steel production have not been evaluated. This study develops hourly, facility-level emissions estimates to assess the effects of strengthened emissions standards on pollution from China’s iron and steel industry.

A choice experiment shows that perceived benefits of vehicle ownership, including non-use values such as schedule flexibility and status in addition to the transport value, are on average larger than their private costs.

Riverine systems help transfer mismanaged waste into the ocean, but riverine litter data are scarce. Using a database of riverine floating macrolitter across Europe, this study estimates that 307–925 million litter items—82% of which is plastic—are transferred annually from Europe into the ocean.

Data on marine litter are scattered. Harmonizing worldwide aquatic litter inventories, this study finds global litter dominated by plastics from take-out food, followed by fishing, with litter being trapped in nearshore areas and land-sourced plastic reaching the open ocean mostly as small fragments.

Innovations to tackle marine litter are urgently needed. A global analysis of solutions to prevent, monitor and clean marine litter identifies 177 solutions, mostly for monitoring, and shows that only a few are ready to use but none have been validated for efficiency and environmental potential.

Deforestation is often driven by land conversion for growing commodity crops. This study finds that, between 2000 and 2019, most soybean expansion in South America was on pastures converted originally for cattle production, especially in the Brazilian Amazon. More soy-driven deforestation occurred in the Brazilian Cerrado.

An analysis of the German bioeconomy between 2000 and 2015 finds that its environmental footprints are dominated by animal-based food consumption, and agricultural land use for consumption abroad is double the domestic one.

The authors show how untreated wastewater laced with microplastics and raw sewage is routinely discharged into UK river flows that are too low to disperse the microplastics downstream. This discharge creates acute microplastic contamination of river beds that threatens biodiversity and the quality of riverine habitats.