Correspondence |
Featured
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Editorial |
The world’s plan to make humanity sustainable is failing. Science can do more to save it
There is no planet B, and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals are heading for the rocks. Researchers around the world must do their bit to change that.
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News & Views |
Violence towards women in environmental protests
An analysis unpicks the various forms of violence that women face when they stand up to polluters and natural-resource extractors.
- Abigail Klopper
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News & Views |
How to define unjust planetary change
Biophysical and sociopolitical factors have been integrated into a set of measures of planetary change that aim to pinpoint safe and just thresholds for all living things. The exercise is immensely ambitious and inevitably challenging.
- Stephen Humphreys
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Correspondence |
Electricity outages delay SDGs in sub-Saharan Africa
- Qian Jia
- , Ying Wang
- & Fengting Li
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Editorial |
Boost African research in exchange for debt relief
Research will satisfy Africa’s demand for energy — but only if the continent is allowed to invest more in its science and innovation.
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News |
World’s first house made with nappy-blended concrete
The challenge for the hybrid material is more one of logistics than compressive strength.
- Elissa Welle
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Correspondence |
Carbon’s social cost can’t be retrofitted to water
- Sarah Wheeler
- , Claudia Ringler
- & Dustin Garrick
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News & Views |
Mixed plastics upcycled dynamically
Waste plastics contain immiscible polymers, making recycling challenging. A new additive enables the thermal reprocessing of mixed plastics into recyclable, high-performance materials.
- Mathieu L. Lepage
- & Jeremy E. Wulff
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Article
| Open AccessReducing brassinosteroid signalling enhances grain yield in semi-dwarf wheat
A strategy that depends on attenuated brassinosteroid signalling is described for the design of semi-dwarf wheat varieties with improved grain yield compared with that of green revolution varieties.
- Long Song
- , Jie Liu
- & Zhongfu Ni
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World View |
Suburbs are a climate disaster, but they can be redeemed
With a radical approach to planning, suburbs in the United States can be made affordable, liveable and climate friendly.
- Dana Cuff
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Editorial |
Global action on water: less rhetoric and more science
The UN’s first water conference in decades put the spotlight on a vital and troubled resource. But to widen access and resolve disputes, one thing is needed above all: data.
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Comment |
Why we need a new economics of water as a common good
Anthropogenic pressures and climate change are altering water flows worldwide. Better understanding, new economic thinking and an international governance framework are needed to stave off catastrophe.
- Johan Rockström
- , Mariana Mazzucato
- & Dieter Gerten
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Article |
Crop switching can enhance environmental sustainability and farmer incomes in China
Spatial optimizations of high-resolution data from China on crop-specific yields, harvested areas, environmental footprints and farmer incomes shows that crop switching can enhance environmental sustainability and farmer incomes, and contribute substantially towards China’s agricultural sustainable development targets.
- Wei Xie
- , Anfeng Zhu
- & Kyle Frankel Davis
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Editorial |
Will the world ever see another IPCC-style body?
Many have sought to copy the IPCC. A new book explains why the panel’s all-encompassing scientific assessments are hard to replicate.
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News |
Quick uptake of ChatGPT, and more — this week’s best science graphics
Three charts from the world of research, selected by Nature editors.
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Article |
Optimal nitrogen rate strategy for sustainable rice production in China
A proposed optimal nitrogen rate strategy together with analysis of an extensive on-farm dataset shows that meeting national rice production targets in 2030 in China is possible while concurrently reducing nationwide nitrogen consumption.
- Siyuan Cai
- , Xu Zhao
- & Xiaoyuan Yan
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Article
| Open AccessFour ways blue foods can help achieve food system ambitions across nations
A study proposes four ways in which foods sourced in aquatic environments can contribute to healthier, more environmentally sustainable and equitable food systems, and examines the relevance of these ambitions to nations.
- Beatrice I. Crona
- , Emmy Wassénius
- & Colette C. C. Wabnitz
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Article |
Ageing threatens sustainability of smallholder farming in China
Rural population ageing reduces the sustainability of smallholder farming in China, but the transition to a new farming model could reverse the negative effects of rural population ageing.
- Chenchen Ren
- , Xinyue Zhou
- & Baojing Gu
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News & Views |
Self-burying robot morphs wood to sow seeds
A natural seed has inspired the design of a robot that can bury itself in soil when exposed to rainfall. The mechanism relies on the shape-changing properties of wood — a simple and elegant example of sustainable innovation.
- Samuel E. Mason
- & Naomi Nakayama
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News |
Farmed salmon and chicken have a global footprint — but the burden is concentrated
A small fraction of Earth’s surface bears almost all of the environmental stresses resulting from industrial salmon and chicken farming.
- Giorgia Guglielmi
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News & Views |
Light-activated catalysts point the way to sustainable chemistry
A light-activated ‘plasmonic’ catalyst, made from abundant elements, produces as much hydrogen from ammonia as do the most-used heat-activated catalysts based on a rarer element, suggesting a strategy for sustainable chemical production.
- Emiliano Cortés
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Article
| Open AccessBiomolecular analyses enable new insights into ancient Egyptian embalming
Philological analysis of labels and instructions, together with gas chromatography–mass spectrometry analysis of residues on vessels recovered from a 26th Dynasty embalming workshop at Saqqara, Egypt provide insights into ancient Egyptian embalming practices.
- Maxime Rageot
- , Ramadan B. Hussein
- & Philipp W. Stockhammer
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Correspondence |
Integrate strategies to save biodiversity and groundwater
- Johannes A. C. Barth
- , Jürgen Geist
- & John Cherry
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Matters Arising |
Reply to: Black carbon attribution
- Joseph R. McConnell
- , Nathan J. Chellman
- & Andreas Stohl
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Correspondence |
Global food security: pool collective intelligence
- Patrick Caron
- , Gabriel Ferrero de Loma-Osorio
- & Youba Sokona
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Comment |
Degrowth can work — here’s how science can help
Wealthy countries can create prosperity while using less materials and energy if they abandon economic growth as an objective.
- Jason Hickel
- , Giorgos Kallis
- & Diana Ürge-Vorsatz
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Article |
Plastic futures and their CO2 emissions
Three alternative CO2 emission-mitigation pathways were analysed for the global plastics sector, covering their production to waste management. A circular bioeconomy strategy could achieve negative emissions in the long term, while at the same time allowing landfilling to be phased out and reducing resource consumption.
- Paul Stegmann
- , Vassilis Daioglou
- & Martin Junginger
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Outlook |
Building a circular economy
Sustainability requires conserving the planet’s resources so that waste products from one process become the input for another.
- Herb Brody
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Outlook |
Short-circuiting the electronic-waste crisis
The computers, smartphones and other technologies that define modern life are creating waste across the world. A combination of technological and policy solutions could help to limit the damage.
- Michael Eisenstein
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Outlook |
Beware the false hope of recycling
Reusing plastics and other materials is not enough. To achieving a circular economy, we must make less stuff to begin with.
- Kristian Syberg
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Outlook |
Smarter ways with water
People need to find better and more productive ways to become allies with water — which might mean giving it space for its processes.
- Erica Gies
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Outlook |
The path towards more-sustainable building construction
The built environment provides a huge opportunity to move to a circular economy. Standardization and smart design will be key to enabling the shift.
- Katharine Sanderson
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Outlook |
Recycling our way to sustainability
A circular economy requires an overhaul of product design, consumption and waste management. Although recycling is dismissed by some as insufficient, it remains an essential process.
- Sarah King
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Outlook |
How to make plastic less of an environmental burden
Plastic has long been an ecological problem. But emerging technologies and more awareness could make the ubiquitous material part of a circular economy.
- Sarah DeWeerdt
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Outlook |
How to rescue biofuels from a sustainable dead end
An environmentally friendly path forwards for liquid fuel derived from plants will depend on smarter agriculture and smarter regulation.
- Peter Fairley
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Outlook |
How to fit clothing into the circular economy
Vast amounts of textiles end up in landfill. Technology to recycle the cellulose in fabric could make clothing more sustainable.
- Neil Savage
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Article |
Using machine learning to assess the livelihood impact of electricity access
Advancements in satellite imagery and machine learning can be used to infer the causal impact of electricity access on livelihoods, providing a low-cost, generalizable approach to evaluating public policy in data-spare environments.
- Nathan Ratledge
- , Gabe Cadamuro
- & Marshall Burke
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Editorial |
Farming feeds the world. We desperately need to know how to do it better
Interventions designed to improve agricultural practices often lack a solid evidence base. A new initiative could change that.
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Research Highlight |
A fortune in gold is buried in electronic waste
US consumers could generate more than one billion pieces of e-waste a year by 2033.
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Article |
Quantifying the cost savings of global solar photovoltaic supply chains
Modelling shows that a globalized solar photovoltaic module supply chain has resulted in photovoltaic installation cost savings of billions of dollars.
- John Paul Helveston
- , Gang He
- & Michael R. Davidson
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Editorial |
Do the science on sustainability now
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are not a priority for research in high-income countries. That must change.
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Article |
From planetary to regional boundaries for agricultural nitrogen pollution
Modelling of regional and planetary boundaries for agricultural nitrogen pollution finds that the global nitrogen surplus boundary is lower than the current nitrogen surplus.
- L. F. Schulte-Uebbing
- , A. H. W. Beusen
- & W. de Vries
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Editorial |
A big chance for science at the heart of global policymaking
The UN’s top leadership is reaching out to the scientific community to help inform decision making — a welcome move in a highly uncertain world.
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Correspondence |
Forests: collect social as well as ecological data
- Rose Pritchard
- , Geoff Wells
- & Casey M. Ryan
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