Environmental social sciences articles within Nature Communications

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  • Q&A
    | Open Access

    Summary: Cultivated or cultured meat is promising to revolutionize the food industry in the coming years to decades, helping to resolve concerns related to the environmental impact and ethical implications linked to conventional meat production. We talked to Dr. Sandhya Sriram, the Group CEO and Co-founder of Shiok Meats Pte. Ltd., Singapore; Prof. Shulamit Levenberg, the former Dean of the Biomedical Engineering Department at the Technion, current Director of the Technion Center for 3D Bioprinting and The Rina & Avner Schneur Center for Diabetes Research, as well as the Co-founder and Chief Scientific Adviser of Aleph Farms, Israel; and Dr. Timothy Olsen, Head of Cultured Meat in the Life Science business at Merck KGaA, Germany; about this relatively new and quickly developing sector. They explain what their teams are working on, including the biggest recent accomplishments, speak about the main challenges facing the field and how they can be resolved, and share their visions about the future of cultivated meat, aiming to provide more equitable and sustainable access to nutritious food for the growing world population.

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The geographic distribution of dengue has been expanding in recent decades, and Vietnam is one of the most severely affected countries. In this study, the authors use Bayesian hierarchical modelling to investigate the socio-environmental and climatic drivers of dengue incidence in Vietnam and how they vary across the country.

    • Rory Gibb
    • , Felipe J. Colón-González
    •  & Rachel Lowe

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The coal chemical sector uses coal to produce chemicals and emits substantial greenhouse gases, which are hard to abate by electrification alone. Deploying green H2 for China’s coal chemical plants can reduce ~50% of emissions at a low cost.

    • Yang Guo
    • , Liqun Peng
    •  & Denise L. Mauzerall

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ronco and colleagues analyze disaster-induced movements in the presence of floods, storms, and landslides during 2016–2021, providing empirical evidence that differential vulnerability exists and quantifying its extent. They achieve this by employing explainable machine learning techniques to model and understand internal displacement flows and patterns from observational data.

    • Michele Ronco
    • , José María Tárraga
    •  & Gustau Camps-Valls

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The estimates of the societal costs of carbon currently used for policy evaluations may be too low due to an insufficient representation of tropical cyclone damage. Accounting for them substantially increases the estimated benefits of climate change mitigation measures.

    • Hazem Krichene
    • , Thomas Vogt
    •  & Christian Otto

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study finds that flood insurance policy design affects economic development in floodplains and, consequently, flood risk in Europe. Therefore, the authors advocate for flood insurance design to be integrated in climate change adaptation policy.

    • Max Tesselaar
    • , W. J. Wouter Botzen
    •  & Jeroen C. J. H. Aerts

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Englander and Costello note that African coastal waters are among the world’s most biologically rich, but African countries earn much less than their peers from selling access to foreign fishers. They find forming a “fish cartel" would increase African fish biomass by 16% and profits by 23%.

    • Gabriel Englander
    •  & Christopher Costello

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors map beliefs in climate change and their correlates in Latin America. The study shows skepticism over the existence and anthropogenic origins of climate change to be limited, but identifies a high number of skeptics around the severity of its consequences. Results also show individualistic worldviews to be the most powerful driver of climate change beliefs in the region.

    • Matias Spektor
    • , Guilherme N. Fasolin
    •  & Juliana Camargo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Green technologies foster the use of green energy; however, large investment costs hinder adoption. In a large-scale field experiment, the authors show that message framing can promote a serious commitment to solar panels among the broader public.

    • Dominik Bär
    • , Stefan Feuerriegel
    •  & Markus Weinmann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Rapid adoption of zero-emission vehicles with a concurrent transition to clean electricity is essential to achieve U.S. transportation decarbonization goals. Managing travel demand can ease this transition by reducing the need for clean electricity supply. @cghoehne, @nrel, #NRELMobility

    • Christopher Hoehne
    • , Matteo Muratori
    •  & Ookie Ma

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Membrane distillation is an emerging desalination technology to obtain freshwater from saline based on low-grade energy. Here the authors report on novel superhydrophobic hierarchical porous membranes with enhanced distillation flux suitable for desalination or wastewater treatment.

    • Youmin Hou
    • , Prexa Shah
    •  & Hans-Jürgen Butt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Electrified groundwater irrigation is a major driver of India’s agricultural growth. India refocussed rural electrification towards household electrification in early 2000s in detriment of groundwater irrigation electrification, the authors find.

    • Sudatta Ray
    •  & Hemant K. Pullabhotla

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A study of 1,028 global cities from 2000-2018 shows increased human exposure to greenspace, reducing greenspace inequality. Notably, cities in the Global South improved nearly four times faster than those in the Global North. These insights can guide city greening strategies.

    • Shengbiao Wu
    • , Bin Chen
    •  & Peng Gong

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Livestock grazing may drive grassland degradation. Here, the authors use process-based modelling validated with empirical data to define a stocking rate threshold across grassland on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, identify vulnerable areas and predict threshold shifts under future climate scenarios.

    • Qiuan Zhu
    • , Huai Chen
    •  & Yanfen Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Food production, especially of animal products, is a major source of air pollutants. Here, the authors quantify the impacts dietary changes towards more plant-based diets could have for air quality, labour productivity, and human health.

    • Marco Springmann
    • , Rita Van Dingenen
    •  & Adrian Leip

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Meat and dairy alternatives are promoted for diet sustainability. Here, the authors use a modelling approach to show that replacing 50% of pork, chicken, beef and milk globally with plant-based alternatives can reduce GHG emissions by 6.3 Gt CO2eq year-1 and more than half biodiversity loss by 2050.

    • Marta Kozicka
    • , Petr Havlík
    •  & Noel Gurwick

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The sustainability of the majority of multispecies reef fisheries around the globe remains unassessed. This study provides context-specific sustainable reference points for coral reef fish using environmental conditions. Using these reference points, they show that most reef fish stocks have failed at least one fisheries sustainability benchmark.

    • Jessica Zamborain-Mason
    • , Joshua E. Cinner
    •  & Sean R. Connolly

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Renewable uncertainty analysis is vital for stochastic-aware research. This study generates a benchmark dataset of year-long hourly renewable prediction errors in China, and reveals the law of the spatiotemporal distribution of renewable uncertainty.

    • Jianxiao Wang
    • , Liudong Chen
    •  & Guannan He

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The risk of heat-mortality is increasing sharply. The authors report that heat-mortality levels of a 1-in-100-year summer in the climate of 2000 can be expected once every ten to twenty years in the current climate and at least once in five years with 2 °C of global warming.

    • Samuel Lüthi
    • , Christopher Fairless
    •  & Ana M. Vicedo-Cabrera

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Solar-powered standalone systems drastically lower the cost of electrifying sub-Saharan Africa. Household electrification can be provided at 7c USD per person per day on average. To reflect inter- and intra-country variance, policymakers should consider electrification cost curves.

    • Florian Egli
    • , Churchill Agutu
    •  & Tobias S. Schmidt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Extensive research efforts have been directed towards the development of PET hydrolases with improved activity, but template enzymes used are limited. Here, the authors report a PET hydrolase from Cryptosporangium aurantiacum (CaPETase) that exhibits high thermostability and PET degradation activity at ambient temperatures and determine its crystal structure.

    • Hwaseok Hong
    • , Dongwoo Ki
    •  & Kyung-Jin Kim

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study shows that 716 million of the world’s lowest income people live in areas with unsafe levels of air pollution, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. With limited access to healthcare, they are especially vulnerable.

    • Jun Rentschler
    •  & Nadezda Leonova

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