Volume 5 Issue 12, December 2022

Private wildlife ranches are considered a mechanism to conserve biodiversity and support livelihoods. Now, a study examines the relative resilience of South African wildlife ranches during the disruptive times of COVID-19.

Hydrological alterations caused by booming hydropower dams in the Mekong River basin are disrupting aquatic ecosystems and local livelihoods, calling for an urgent rethinking of hydropower development. Alternative operating strategies of existing Mekong dams could help restore the natural hydrological regimes without affecting power generation.

A method to incorporate highly aligned nanosheets into a polymer matrix provides a promising strategy for fabricating membranes with high ion conductivity and selectivity — a key requirement for some energy-storage technologies.

Acceleration of crop yield gains, coupled with parallel intensification of the livestock sector, would enable Brazil to increase current soybean production by 36% by 2035 without deforestation and with a notable reduction in greenhouse gas emissions compared with following present trends.

Sustainable agrifood systems are critical to redefining the interactions of humanity and nature in the twenty-first century. This Perspective presents an agenda and examples for the comprehensive redesign of agrifood systems according to principles of sufficiency, regeneration, distribution, commons and care.

Vast areas of the Amazon forest have been lost to agriculture in recent decades. This study assesses the potential of intensification—increasing yields on a given area—to produce more soybean in Brazil without further Amazon forest loss and to reduce existing CO₂ emissions.

Producing sufficient food to support the planet’s growing population places enormous strain on critical ecosystems. Quantifying and mapping the individual and cumulative pressures from greenhouse gases, freshwater use, habitat disturbance and nutrient pollution provides crucial insight into producing lower-impact, more sustainable foods.

Conservation efforts were impacted in varied ways by the COVID-19 pandemic. This study assessed how South African wildlife ranches, agricultural farms and protected areas weathered the pandemic, finding greater adaptive capacity among more diversified and mixed business models.

Coastal cities face a compound threat from relative sea-level rise and land subsidence; however, local land subsidence rates are spatially variable and can be difficult to quantify. Remote interferometric radar observations allow high-resolution estimations of local land subsidence to better inform the future of major coastal cities.

A multi-objective optimization water–energy model explores the effect of dam re-operation strategies to minimize hydrological alterations in the Lower Mekong. Dam re-operation provides a feasible opportunity for the restoration of key elements of hydrological variability without hindering hydropower production.

The development of symbiotic infrastructure systems can provide more efficient resource use than single infrastructure improvements. Carbon mitigation and freshwater conservation are possible in China by bridging coal power and wastewater treatment plants.

Membranes are at the heart of various technologies for water, energy and other sustainability relevant areas. Here the authors show a synthetic route to a polymeric membrane that breaks the conductivity–selectivity trade-off and enables exciting performance in a vanadium flow battery.

More efficient use of solar energy can help the transition to a sustainable energy system. Here the authors show that a plasmonic CuS/CdS heterostructure can convert infrared radiation to visible light, driving oxidation of methanol to formaldehyde and photocatalytic hydrogen evolution, with stable activities for one week.

Achievement of global spatial targets for protected areas is not being matched by quality of management. This study quantifies current shortfalls in numbers of rangers and other personnel for those areas and assesses future requirements as more areas are set aside.