Reviews & Analysis

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.

Crude oil contains multiple valuable hydrocarbons used for material synthesis, but their separation involves a laborious and energy-intensive multistep distillation process. Now, scientists introduce a simple two-step separation of important hydrocarbons from crude oil under ambient conditions using selective chemistry.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Managing medical waste, and more generally solid waste, was extremely challenging during the COVID-19 pandemic, with cities around the world responding quite differently. Now researchers show how having access to reliable data often determined a city’s response to the pandemic-induced waste crisis.

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.

Evaluating the short-term exposure to wildfire-specific fine particulate matter (PM_2.5) showed greater risks of hospitalization for all major respiratory diseases than non-wildfire PM_2.5. When developing air quality guidelines, it is also important to consider that PM_2.5 from varying sources can have different health effects, which require targeted health and environmental policy approaches.

Membranes supporting selective ion transport provide the opportunity to generate electricity from water sources with different salt concentrations. Now researchers report a strategy to align nanochannels in covalent organic framework membranes for unprecedented performance in osmotic energy harvesting.

Waste-to-nutrition pathways convert organic waste into food for people and livestock. Simulations of nine future scenarios in France reveal that the potential of five such pathways for reducing the environmental impacts of food and waste systems depends on process efficiencies, availability of low-carbon energy and the extent to which novel foods replace meat.

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.

Biodiversity offsetting policies are increasing in number and variety around the world, but the process of moving from conceiving offsettings to implementing them is not always clear. This Review synthesizes evidence on how the main actors influence offset policies to support efforts towards developing more sustainable biodiversity offsetting.

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.

The aquaculture sector in the Amazon is an important source of food and livelihood provision; however, it is associated with environmental and ecological risks. This Review assesses aquaculture in the Amazon, offering insights into the challenges and opportunities for its sustainable growth.

Solar interfacial desalination could enable the sustainable production of freshwater, but scale-up remains challenging. Now, analysis of the efficiency and costs of a large-scale interfacial desalination system operating outdoors over nearly four months suggests that scale-up is associated with high capital investment and a lower water production rate compared with laboratory-scale devices.

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.