Volume 8 Issue 6, June 2025

Climate science and national emissions reporting communities have historically used different definitions and methods for anthropogenic land-based carbon removals. As the mitigation agenda accelerates, reconciling these differences for comparability and moving towards integration is crucial for enhancing confidence in land-use emission estimates.

Meeting global hydrogen demand with zero-carbon processes also requires finding enough market space for their associated co-products. Helping to access new markets, researchers have now tuned their catalyst to co-produce acetic acid, a crucial commodity chemical, with high selectivity and minimal CO₂ emissions.

Energy models make projections for infrastructure, yet struggle to map deployment pathways at the ground level, where risks and benefits to human and natural systems materialize. A study now shows how blending in geospatial science can help to preserve natural capital while allowing for new infrastructure to be built.

Hypochlorite is in wide industrial and domestic use as disinfectant, but its manufacture, involving the processing and transport of hazardous chemicals, is problematic. Now a safer, more sustainable alternative, powered by sunlight and seawater, has been developed.

Natural rubber has many uses in a variety of industries, enabled by ‘crosslinking’ between its tangled polymers, which creates elasticity. But rubber can crack and suffer fatigue. It is now shown that reducing the crosslink density in highly entangled natural rubber increases its crack resistance and prolongs its useful life.

Transformation to healthier and more sustainable diets in China can generate measurable benefits for nutrition, the environment and food affordability. Integrating multidimensional sustainability goals into China’s dietary guidelines can help to align food policy with long-term societal and environmental improvements.

A systematic literature review is conducted to explore the promise and limitations of systems-based methods in addressing plastic pollution. The findings suggest that more literature focused on the whole life cycle of plastics is needed to improve understanding of the complex societal challenge and guide science-based policymaking.

This Review highlights how membrane technology can drive sustainability and steer industries towards a sustainable future, providing perspectives on materials, manufacturing processes and applications with respect to energy saving, process intensification and environmental impacts.

The transition to sustainable diets is challenging for countries that face malnutrition and limited resources. Now a study explores how various dietary transformations in China can improve public health, make food affordable and reduce environmental impacts, while evaluating the feasibility of the diet changes.

Net-zero policies can put pressure on land use, which can conflict with preserving natural landscapes, cultural sites and agricultural areas. Now a study integrates national energy models with proactive and collaborative planning to design net-zero pathways that conserve natural capital and address diverse concerns.

Transitioning to a net-zero future requires several energy-related interventions by a variety of actors across scales. Modelling results now show that, considering critical trade-offs and uncertainties, there is significant spatial flexibility in how the European energy system can be designed to achieve carbon neutrality.

Active radiant cooling is an emerging technology that consumes less energy than traditional air conditioning. This work demonstrates an outdoor radiant cooling structure incorporating infrared-reflective surfaces that delivers enhanced thermal comfort.

Elastocaloric cooling has emerged as an eco-friendly technology with low greenhouse gas emissions and high energy efficiency. Here the all-solid-state elastocaloric cooler shows a long operational life of over 2 million cycles.

Solid-state sodium batteries represent more sustainable options as they combine resource abundance with safety. This work advances their performance, particularly fast cycling lifespan, to an unprecedented level utilizing a hybrid electrolyte.

Active chlorine is the most widely used water disinfectant, but its production has environmental consequences. This work shows a photoelectrochemical synthetic route using only solar energy and seawater.

Seawater is the most abundant source of uranium. This work shows a bipolar electrochemical mining process from seawater at ultra-low voltages, ensuring maximized extraction efficiency and minimized energy consumption.

Natural rubber is a widely used biopolymer and further improving its resistance to crack growth will extend its service life. Here the authors show a strategy to amplify the resistance to crack growth in natural rubber by forming a tanglemer.

This analysis looks at the impacts and outcomes from installing solar arrays on agricultural land, finding that these ‘agrisolar’ projects can displace food production but simultaneously provide economic security and offset water use.

Plastics pollution has intertwined environmental, economic and social consequences calling for holistic solutions that require systems analysis. This study evaluates how and to what extent systems analysis tools are used in research on plastic pollution to support policy design.