Perspectives

Multiple cropping has a significant impact on environmental and socioeconomic outcomes of farming, but is not fully considered in model-based assessments of sustainable agriculture

Ditches have many overlooked environmental and societal roles, including impact on biodiversity and pollution, and management strategies to enhance their multifunctional landscape-scale benefits are needed, according to a review of physical, biotic, chemical, and human factors.

Spectrally nudged storylines are innovative methods for attributing extreme weather events to anthropogenic climate change, which can address the limitations of conventional probabilistic attribution methods by focusing on specific historical events with significant impacts.

Supply disruption, environmental and social impacts, resource depletion, circularity, and substitutability influence the sustainable supply of critical raw materials for water electrolysers and fuel cells, according to a perspective assessing different fuel cells and critical raw materials.

Expanding the definition of the photic zone to include all biological processes driven by celestial light improves researchers’ capability to investigate the impact of changing light levels upon marine organisms.

Integrated Fire Management can be used as a valuable adaptation and mitigation strategy combining fire prevention, response, and recovery across different ecological, socio-economic, and cultural contexts.

Pollution across the entire plastic lifecycle is a system-wide risk to food. Aspirational indicators related to plastic polymers and chemicals, land use, trade, and waste, environmental and human health can help future monitoring of food system plastics.

Amines, ubiquitous atmospheric compounds that are emitted from a range of natural and anthropogenic sources, play a key role in enhancing aerosol formation and activating cloud condensation nuclei, yet are under-represented in climate models and require future high-precision measurement.

The study of mineral host-inclusion systems by Raman spectroscopy at non-ambient conditions is an effective method to probe in situ deformational processes in the Earth’s interior

Soil-based carbon dioxide removal approaches that make use of primary and secondary minerals can create synergies between inorganic carbon, soil organic carbon, and stable biochar carbon formation.

Data-driven equation discovery, a new scientific artificial intelligence pathway, can identify hidden patterns in data and transform them into interpretable equations, automating and accelerating discovery processes in various geoscience disciplines, according to a review of the advantages and potential challenges of data-driven equation discovery in geoscience.

The transition of food and agriculture sectors to a circular bioeconomy needs to consider an economic view, which helps to identify strategies that balance social and private sector objectives and environmental benefits according to a social cost-benefit framework.

Indirect moisture injections to the stratosphere after a Pinatubo-sized volcanic eruption could be comparable to direct injection observed after the 2022 Hunga Tonga eruptions, according to a quantification based on the warming of the lowest cold-point temperatures in the tropical tropopause layer.

The microbial process of methane oxidation is slow due to energy limitations in environments exposed to low methane concentrations, but understanding limiting factors may help to enhance rates of atmospheric methane removal, according to a review of ecological and evolutionary aspects.

Humans must be represented within digital twins of the Earth, but they also play a role outside to govern development and access and guide usage, argues a perspective based on interdisciplinary scientific expert viewpoints.

Pollutant Release and Transfers Registers (PRTRs) can be used as a valuable tool in assessing progress towards reducing human and ecological harm from chemicals.

A systemic approach which considers all stakeholders and combines multiple policy instruments is necessary to reduce global reliance on chemicals in agriculture, according to a review of the agronomic and economic challenges and barriers to existing policies.

Addressing coastal ocean acidification requires holistic and harmonized actions across several sustainable development goals (SDGs) and a range of indicators to encourage mitigation efforts at local scales, suggests a synthesis of direct and indirect links between ocean pH and SDGs.

The apparent prevalence of tropical natural reforestation versus planted trees varies greatly, and it depends on underlying land change processes, recommending a long-term demographic approach to forest-change observation, according to a review of estimates of land use processes.

Different ways to calculate carbon footprints and the implications of choosing one option over another are visualised in an open-access web application that uses a global input-output database to produce Sankey diagrams of carbon flows for 49 world regions between 1995 and 2019.