Perspectives in 2025

Including First Nations’ cultural and ecological values in natural capital accounting by engaging with land and sea managers helps bridge the gap between Indigenous and Western knowledge and enables inclusive decision making, as discussed through three Australian case studies in this Perspective.

The Polar Amplification Model Intercomparison Project reveals robust jet stream and storm track responses to Arctic sea-ice loss that are separable from internal variability, and the model diversity provides pathways to constrain the real-world response

Tourism supports Arctic economies, yet tourism is often left out of plans to address permafrost change. Building resilience should include tourism-inclusive dialogue, clear communication tools, and risk awareness in tourism planning.

Very short-lived convective dust events in urban areas are not always captured by traditional air quality monitoring in the USA; finer temporal scale measurements are needed to avoid health risks being overlooked

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.