Research articles

Recovering from the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic while achieving environmental goals requires creative policy measures. This study analyses the sustainability co-benefits of reducing sugar consumption through redirecting existing sugar cropland to alternative uses via sugar taxation.

Mechanical soil decontamination is an important tool in remediating contaminated soils. Remediation efforts following the Fukushima Daiichi disaster increased soil erosion and downstream sediment loads that showed reduced ¹³⁷Cs concentrations, but rapid revegetation quickly restored decontaminated landscapes.

Biological invasions involve complex interactions between social and environmental factors, challenging effective management. This study represents the invasion of Minnesota lakes by zebra mussels as a network of interactions and finds that using network metrics can guide effective management.

Poor access to safe drinking water is a major global sustainability issue. Solar disinfection provides a feasible solution. Here the authors examine the potential of five most typical types of this technology, revealing their unique challenges and opportunities.

Intensifying food production sustainably is critical given growing demand and agriculture’s environmental footprint. This meta-analysis finds that practices such as adding organic matter and increasing crop diversity can partly substitute for nitrogen fertilizer to sustain or increase yields.

Why environmental benefits are valued differently across individuals and regions is not well understood. Using large-scale survey data collected across G20 countries, this study finds that a few social indicators explain the diversity in people’s perceptions of environmental benefits.

The Sustainable Development Goals were launched as a worldwide governance framework, but little is known about their actual political impacts. This study shows evidence that the Sustainable Development Goals have had largely a discursive influence and only limited transformative political impact.

If people had truly unlimited wants as assumed in economics, pursuing sustainability would be a real challenge. This study provides evidence that most people’s wants are moderate rather than unlimited, suggesting that policies limiting wealth in pursuit of sustainability could be acceptable to many.

The development of complex societies and their agricultural bases underlies key challenges we still face. This study demonstrates sustainable intensification of a pig and millet system that helped feed the earliest complex societies in North China.

Systems that combine agriculture and aquaculture have the potential to intensify food production relatively sustainably. This study shows how models of such co-culture systems based on ecological networks can optimize production based on the species involved.

The importance of ensuring access to clean drinking water is manifested in UN Sustainable Development Goals. Here, a national-level assessment of tap-water safety shows spatial variations across China. The disparity is correlated with natural and anthropogenic factors and linked to public health-risk rates.

Vehicles are responsible for a large share of urban air pollution, but emissions estimates omit the full driving cycle or focus on only a few vehicles. Using GPS traces, emissions from thousands of private vehicles in three European cities are estimated to identify gross polluters and grossly polluted roads.

Changes in agricultural practices have led to the expansion of tree plantations across the tropics, but this expansion is poorly characterized. Nearly 7 million unique patches of observed tree cover gain are classified through satellite imagery to report on tropical tree plantation expansion between 2000 and 2012.

Ammonia plays a crucial role in the world’s food supply; however, its production from Haber–Bosch process features heavy CO₂ emissions and energy consumption. Here the authors show a more sustainable approach to synthesize ammonia utilizing a membrane reactor.

Anionic redox has emerged as a new frontier in the design of high-energy cathode materials for next-generation batteries. This study provides a theoretical framework to understand the trilateral correlation of oxygen redox, structural disorder and bond covalency.

The increasing demand for technological products across the world pushes further the consumption of most metals, resulting in growing sustainability concerns. This study examines a yearly cohort of 61 extracted metals over time and estimates their lifetimes and losses throughout their life cycles.

Wood is one of the most renewable materials with applications in construction and other industries. The authors show a process that gives low-value wood and biomass residuals a new life by transforming them into materials with mechanical properties comparable to metals and other structural elements.

Accurate models of pro-environmental behaviour can inform interventions to foster sustainability. This study estimates the extent to which psychological factors like attitudes and personal norms explain greenhouse gas emissions from clothing purchasing across four countries.

Agricultural expansion is responsible for tree loss in tropical dry woodlands, but the dynamics of such loss are not well understood. This study presents a global, high-resolution assessment of deforestation dynamics in dry woodlands and provides a tool for consistent monitoring.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected a range of human activities, but its effect on land management is less clear. This study finds an increase in fires inside Madagascar’s protected areas during periods when management stopped due to COVID-19 lockdowns.