Brief Communications

The decarbonization of oil and gas companies may not be as speedy or robust as advertised. This analysis finds that renewable energies make up just a minor fraction of the total energy production by the biggest companies globally.

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas with a large decadal-scale impact on climate change. Accounting for climate and ecological feedback loops can help mitigate its impact.

Agroforestry is a natural climate solution providing ecological and socio-economic benefits at local scales, however whether it reduces deforestation at landscape scale is still unclear. Authors use causal inference to examine the effects of agroforestry on deforestation across Southeast Asia.

Preserving and expanding blue carbon ecosystems have been hailed as a climate-friendly nature-based solution to store carbon. However, this can cause co-accumulation of neurotoxic mercury, highlighting the need for holistic climate solutions.

Within high-level conferences devoted to climate or sustainability action, differences in views can lead to differences in policy. This study surveyed how delegates at COP24 perceived the efficacy of technology and climate targets.

Seagrass ecosystems often co-occur with urbanized coastal regions, providing important filtration services that reduce human bacterial pathogens from coastal sources. This study examines whether such filtration function is transferred to food fish such as marine bivalves, and its global applicability.

Renewable energy from reservoir-based hydropower plants can have high GHG emissions. Integrating floating solar photovoltaics on hydropower reservoirs can help offset GHG emissions from a large proportion of hydropower facilities.

Narco trafficking and subsequent counter-drug interdiction strategies can lead to loss of biodiverse forests, which are important habitats for resident and migratory bird species. This study evaluates how such activities can threaten the bird habitat in Central American forests.

An increasingly warm climate can lead to more intense, frequent and longer periods of hazardous heat, increasing the risk of heat-related health concerns. This study assesses whether incarcerated people in the United States are potentially disproportionately exposed to such hazardous heat conditions.

Picturing positive changes resulting from greener transport policies can be more effective than trying to shift climate beliefs, often related to party affiliations. A study shows how AI pictures of future car-free cities enhanced Americans’ willingness to support more sustainable transport policies.

Efforts to protect and conserve the planet’s land and oceans should also guarantee that people can access them equitably. Comparing marine and terrestrial protected areas in the United States, a study shows different access patterns based on income and race.

Biodiversity protection indicators are important to assess progress towards sustainable development goals. Using mountain ecosystems as an example, this study compared two biodiversity protection reporting metrics varying in their underlying methods and applied at different spatial scales.

Environmental impact assessments are often blamed for delays in resource management, but this analysis finds that EIAs contribute a small fraction of time to implement forest management relative to other parts of the process.

Restoring forests is a policy priority globally, but often, little attention is paid to the type of forest being restored, which matters for biodiversity and livelihoods. Using a map of forest management types, this study assessed the extent of managed forests in recent tree-cover gains globally.

The idea that technology and green growth strategies can sufficiently decouple economic growth from associated environmental impacts has both supporters and opposers. This study presents the views of climate policy researchers from 73 countries on different growth models, including green growth, agrowth and degrowth.

Failing to keep the increase of global mean temperature below 1.5 °C will have multiple negative implications. A study maps the annual changes in cooling demand, showing the most affected countries by warming, if the global mean temperature rises from 1.5 °C to 2.0 °C

This study shows how a form of olfactory misinformation (odour camouflage) on a newly sown wheat crop can prevent wild house mice from finding buried seeds, substantially reducing seed loss in an ethical way.

The US Inflation Reduction Act sets that in 2027, for an electric vehicle to be tax-credit eligible, 80% of the market value of critical minerals in its battery must be sourced domestically, from US free-trade partners or from North American recycling. The viability of the target is evaluated for different battery chemistries.

Coral reefs, with their colourful biodiversity, are icons of nature tourism. Leveraging social media data, this study finds that live reefs attract tourists, supporting local conservation, but that such tourism harms especially the healthiest reefs.

Systems that combine agriculture and aquaculture have the potential to intensify food production relatively sustainably. This study shows how models of such co-culture systems based on ecological networks can optimize production based on the species involved.