Perspectives

Inaccuracies in the evaluation of project impacts, even under ex ante scenarios, can cause overestimation or underestimation of carbon offsets. This study shows the potential of systematic ex post evaluations to enhance the credibility of voluntary carbon market schemes.

History can enhance the robustness of scenario planning for the food system. Through cases in Mozambique, Bangladesh and Holland, this Perspective illustrates how historical insights can guide interventions on various scales for more resilient food systems.

While adaptation to climate and environmental impacts is assumed for future development, this Perspective provides evidence that adaptation may be more limited or even undermined by climate change, requiring difficult societal decisions to be made.

Adopting early dry season fires has been proposed as a means of generating sufficient carbon revenues to pay for conservation in Africa. However, the climatic impact thereof is deeply questionable and may have unforeseen detrimental effects.

Perennial woody crops are important sources of food that can provide ecosystem benefits through their long-lived nature and structural complexity. This Perspective provides a roadmap to harness the potential of perennial woody crops towards holistic sustainable development.

Integrating citizen science into artificial intelligence (AI) can help address major sustainability issues as well as some of the potential drawbacks associated with a wide use of AI. This Perspective highlights the advantages and challenges of such integration in light of achieving sustainable development.

Efforts to address the water challenges that societies face are hindered by a lack of funding and ineffective implementation, as well as poor understanding of the causes. Adopting a beyond growth framing, this Perspective reflects on the responses needed to mitigate water crises around the world.

Reef fish species associated with small-scale coastal fisheries often have life histories that involve dispersal and migration. This Perspective provides a framework to incorporate such fish movement patterns or connectivity into sustainable fisheries management and conservation of coral reefs.

Carbon taxes face several challenges in practice. This Perspective identifies three such challenges and suggests that, to meet them, carbon taxes should be designed like income taxes. The tax rate of a person should increase with the greenhouse gases the person emits through their consumption.

Transitioning to low-carbon societies will mean shifts in laws as well as systems, requiring conversations about social and economic justice associated with this shift. This Perspective examines how litigation can be used to understand and facilitate these claims of justice

This Perspective analyses the key elements of the long-term success of an irrigator-led conservation programme in the United States from engineering, social and policy angles and identifies transferable governance lessons for other agricultural regions.

The global biodiversity crisis impacting agriculture is overlooked compared with wild systems. This Perspective presents an overview of the the tools developed for wild biodiversity conservation and provides a framework to adapt these for agrobiodiversity conservation to better address sustainability goals.

In the midst of debates about climate and environmental impacts of meat, this Perspective uses Norway as a case study to frame a more holistic and nuanced approach to sustainable food production.

Migration has become a key research topic in recent years, but rural migration is relatively understudied despite the vast number of people and areas affected around the world. This Perspective lays out critical dimensions and dynamics that are worth examining.

Outdoor recreation is an essential component of forming an understanding of nature, and hunting and fishing are no exception. This Perspective looks at how these activities can generate feelings of stewardship towards the environment and wildlife.

Digital technology is increasingly being used to address food security issues against the backdrop of anthropogenic stressors such as climate change and resource scarcity. This Perspective discusses ways to effectively deploy edge AI in food production systems to improve agricultural sustainability.

Additive manufacturing is gaining growing attention as an alternative to conventional methods, but it can support more-sustainable manufacturing processes if developed through a system-level approach. This Perspective discusses how to achieve such a holistic development of additive manufacturing systems for sustainability.

Designing and implementing effective carbon offset mechanisms is a complex and challenging process. This Perspective underscores the importance of transparency across the carbon-offsetting value chain and places it as a prerequisite for efficient offset mechanisms and, ultimately, carbon emissions reduction.

Global food supply chains drive ecosystem degradation and social injustices. This Perspective focuses on the ability of midstream actors operating between agricultural commodity producers and manufacturers of food products to improve supply chain sustainability.

Research on how to support human exploration and eventual habitation of outer space is advancing. However, while its aims are beyond our planet, space bioprocess engineering has practical sustainability applications here on Earth.