Review Articles

Massive hydropower expansion in the global south repeats unsustainable past social and environmental harms, raising questions about how to govern these projects effectively. This Review highlights shifting and evolving global dynamics, and identifies opportunities for more just and strategic hydropower governance.

In recent decades, zoonotic disease outbreaks have become increasingly frequent, necessitating strategies to improve the accuracy of predictive modelling. This Review discusses the importance of macroecological variables in such modelling efforts to improve preparedness for future potential outbreaks.

Sodium-ion batteries are emerging as a complementary technology to lithium-ion batteries, but are not yet ready for widespread practical adoption. This Review provides an overview of various sodium-ion chemistries with respect to key criteria, including sustainability, before discussing potential solutions, market prospects and future work.

This Review synthesizes current knowledge on combining solar energy with agriculture (agrivoltaics) or natural vegetation (ecovoltaics), discusses the rationale for studying these systems, examines design and technological advances, and identifies future challenges and priorities.

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.

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.

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.

River deltas have played a central role in the development of human societies, providing a multitude of environmental services to large populations. In the face of climate change and human impact, careful and strategic management is now required to ensure the future sustainability of habitable deltas.

The paradigm shift in sewage management from pollution control to resource recovery is highly desired from a circular economy perspective. This Review presents the latest developments and the key challenges in this field and outlines a roadmap towards greener and more sustainable sewage management.

Contemporary discussions about sustainability and adaptation rely on concepts of regeneration. Linking regenerative dynamics and practices from disparate disciplines provides a framework for employing regenerative systems to advance cross-domain sustainability science.

Measuring the heath of urban greenery is costly but important. This Review presents the advantages and trade-offs of technology-supported tools to measure the health of urban greenery and highlights the importance of high-resolution urban greenery data to support cities in achieving Sustainable Development Goals.

Translating Earth system boundaries across scale involves scientific and normative judgements, with associated assumptions, bias and uncertainties. A protocol involving key building blocks and control steps in translation is presented with focus on businesses and cities, two understudied critical actors.

Many of the barriers to progress in addressing environmental problems, such as climate change, are political. This Review illustrates how insight into politics can help policymakers craft strategies to address the ambition gap, the implementation gap and the international action gap.

The textile industry is energy intensive and releases huge amounts of pollutants to the environment. Here the authors take a life cycle approach to examine the technological progress made to improve the sustainability of each stage and propose the future directions.

Renewable electricity-powered CO₂ electroreduction offers a sustainable route to transform the chemical industry. Here the authors overview four CO₂ electrolysis pathways that could be immune from carbonate formation, a major technological barrier.

This article reviews the past decade of literature reporting the application of resilience science in sustainable development practice. Although innovative complexity-oriented practices have emerged, the article shows that dominant applications diverge substantially from the science.

There is a growing awareness that plastic pollution poses a major environmental threat. This Review highlights the knowledge gap on their long-term impacts and recommends inclusion in life cycle analysis for better decision-making.

Today’s energy systems rely on rechargeable batteries but the growing demand raises environmental concerns. As more data become available, sensing can play a key role in advancing utilization strategies for new and used lithium-ion devices. This Review discusses how optical sensors can help to improve the sustainability of batteries.

Emergency frames in sustainability debates can stimulate collective action on issues for which it is lacking but can have consequences. This Review examines the political effects of emergency frames in sustainability and develops a typology of different effects to build a shared vocabulary for analysis and decision-making.

The transfer of public funds between governments within a country based on ecological indicators is an emerging tool in environmental policy. A review of extant and proposed schemes identifies challenges and opportunities to expand the use of this instrument.