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Global analysis of obesity trends from 1980 to 2024 in 200 countries and territories using data from 4,050 population-based studies reveals that framing obesity as a single global epidemic masks the highly varied dynamics across countries and age groups.

Growing up as a city dweller and later experiencing village life as a student, I have witnessed the profound post-communist transformations in Hungary’s urban and rural landscapes. This dual perspective has led me to view cities and their surrounding villages as integrated regions that are critical to sustainable urban planning.

Coastal nitrogen pollution is a critical sustainability challenge with environmental, social and economic consequences. Upstream ‘sweet spots’ where interventions will have maximum mitigation effectiveness and social buy-in are attractive but may prove difficult to implement in urban stream networks.

The advantage of living in cities compared with rural areas with respect to height and BMI in children and adolescents has generally become smaller globally from 1990 to 2020, except in sub-Saharan Africa.

Wastewater-based surveillance tends to focus on specific pathogens. Here, the authors mapped the wastewater virome from 62 cities worldwide to identify over 2,500 viruses, revealing city-specific virome fingerprints and showing that wastewater metagenomics enables early detection of emerging viruses.

Urban blue spaces, such as lakes and rivers, play growing roles in cities but are historically vital for providing food. Focusing on four Indian cities, this study finds diverse blue foraging practices most practiced by elderly women, especially among the most disadvantaged groups.

The authors conduct a national inventory on individual tree carbon stocks in Rwanda using aerial imagery and deep learning. Most mapped trees are located in farmlands; new methods allow partitioning to any landscape categories, effective planning and optimization of carbon sequestration and the economic benefits of trees.

Treatment-seeking for fever is widely used to estimate treatment of childhood infections, but cross-country comparisons are problematic. Here, the authors estimate the probability of seeking treatment for fever at public facilities across 29 countries by quantifying person-level latent variables.

This study presents the Global Covenant of Mayors Energy Access and Poverty Pillar and analyses its first-year implementation across 1,354 municipalities that account for 296 million people, revealing adoption patterns and sectoral priorities.

Global Burden of Disease analysis found that in 2023, suboptimal diet was estimated to be responsible for 4 million deaths and 97 million morbidity burdens from ischemic heart disease.

The study presents CLUES, an open-source workflow that automates linking global environmental data with geolocated biomedical data, enabling scalable research while supporting FAIR data practices and privacy-aware integration.

Airborne hexavalent chromium nanoparticles were found at concerning levels in debris-cleanup zones after the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires and can travel several kilometers downwind, posing potential health risks to nearby communities, based on mobile air measurements and 3D chemical transport modeling.

A longitudinal study shows that racial diversity in higher education is associated with higher student salaries at graduation, indicating that policies to increase or leverage racial diversity enhance human capital and benefit society.

Human-driven declines of top predators can have cascading effects on other species. Here the authors show that the loss of wolves from a landscape has facilitated the spread of the golden jackal through Europe and model the potential future colonization of this species.

The future challenges and potential opportunities of robotics and autonomous systems in urban ecosystems, and how they may impact biodiversity, are explored and prioritized via a global horizon scan of 170 experts.

Analyses of data from the UK Biobank reveal different urban living environments that are associated with affective, anxiety and emotional instability symptom groups and mediated by distinct neurological and genetic pathways in adults.

Obtaining data on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) from healthy human populations is difficult. Here, Hendriksen et al. use metagenomic analysis to obtain AMR data from untreated sewage from 79 sites in 60 countries, finding correlations with socio-economic, health and environmental factors.

Analysis combining multiple global tree databases reveals that whether a location is invaded by non-native tree species depends on anthropogenic factors, but the severity of the invasion depends on the native species diversity.

Contrary to the view that urbanization is a major driver of the global rise in obesity, the global increase in body-mass index is shown to be mostly due to increases in the body-mass indexes of rural populations.

Cities are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, but the potential of urban rivers to such emissions is not well understood. A study now quantifies the greenhouse gas concentrations, fluxes and emissions from urban rivers globally.

Analysis of soundscape data from 139 globally distributed sites reveals that sounds of biological origin exhibit predictable rhythms depending on location and season, whereas sounds of anthropogenic origin are less predictable. Comparisons between paired urban–rural sites show that urban green spaces are noisier and dominated by sounds of technological origin.

An extensive analysis of the gut microbiome in Ethiopian children identifies microbial metabolic pathways that can be attributed to a Western diet, and that the consumption of foods like traditional fermented cereal are associated with higher microbial diversity.

Here the authors show that gut metagenomes of Indigenous Australian infants living remotely, display greater diversity and abundance of bacteria, viruses and fungi, compared to non-Indigenous infants living in urban Australia, suggesting that while having access to Western foods, the infants start life with a gut microbiome that retains key features of pre-industrialized societies.

Land use choices shape outcomes for biodiversity, people, and climate. This study suggests that under a ‘Nature as Culture’ scenario, Europe’s climate would become warmer and drier, whereas the ‘Nature for Nature’ and ‘Nature for Society’ scenarios would avoid additional climate impacts.

Tree cover gains in the moist tropics (1982–2015) were 56% naturally regenerated forests and 27% managed tree systems, with forest type influencing carbon recovery. Effective forest restoration requires robust tracking of forest types established by restoration efforts.

This Perspective examines how a systemic, service-oriented framing of nature-based solutions can enhance multifunctionality and long-term resilience within complex social–ecological systems. Aligning adaptive co-management, integrated indicators and governance–finance structures enables nature-based solutions interventions to address interconnected climate, biodiversity and water challenges.

Grovogui et al. demonstrate major disparities in Grand Conakry, Guinea, in geographic access to healthcare facilities providing childbirth care, driven by the skewed spatial distribution of health facilities, heavy traffic and socio-economic disadvantage

Social contact data are important for modelling epidemic transmission dynamics but limited data are available for lower- and middle-income countries. Here, the authors present social contact data in Guatemala, India, Mozambique and Pakistan collected in 2021-2023.

Recent estimates of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) intake are generally unavailable. Here the authors show a global SSBs intake of 2.7 servings/week in 2018 in adults (range: 0.7 South Asia, 7.8 Latin America/Caribbean); intakes were higher among males, younger, more educated, and urban adults.

An analysis of fish and macroinvertebrate communities in European rivers over 32 years shows that inland ship traffic is associated with declining taxonomic richness, diversity and trait richness and with increased taxonomic evenness.

High-latitude soils are future soil organic carbon loss hotspots, with losses dominated by particulate organic carbon (POC). The fraction of POC in total SOC (f_POC) is a key indicator, emphasizing the climate importance of preserving POC.

Micro- and nano-plastics in city air raise health concerns, as polymer analysis by pyrolysis gas chromatography mass spectrometry links exposure to higher cardiopulmonary and lung cancer mortality in humans.

“Dissolved oxygen (DO) sustains river ecosystems, but the effects of hydrological extremes remain poorly understood. Here it is shown that sudden floods cause abrupt declines in DO, suggesting that increased future flooding may lead to the degradation of aquatic ecosystems.

Delayed treatment for malaria increases the risk of severe disease. Here, the authors estimate the rates of treatment delay for children under five in malaria-endemic regions of Africa.

Waveguide-integrated InAs quantum dots produce quantum-coherent emission in the O-band with promising optical characteristics for scalable quantum networks.

Estimates from the Global Dietary Database indicated that 2.2 million new type 2 diabetes and 1.2 million new cardiovascular disease cases were attributable to sugar-sweetened beverages worldwide in 2020, with the highest burdens in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Here the authors report that lipidomics analysis of over 13,000 Australians from two cohorts identifies distinct blood lipid signatures linked to habitual dietary exposures. Lipid markers of healthier diets were associated with lower cardiovascular risk and reduced all-cause mortality.