Earth and environmental sciences articles from across Nature Portfolio

Multinational investment is vital for African growth, yet it drives higher rates of forest loss than local industry. Researchers now suggest that home-country laws should hold global firms accountable for their environmental footprint abroad.

Integrating different measures of protected area effectiveness and social outcomes under a quasi-experimental analytical framework highlights tricky trade-offs in implementing ambitious global biodiversity policy.

Models have long predicted, and satellites have observed, stratospheric cooling from rising anthropogenic carbon dioxide, yet its magnitude and structure have lacked a robust theoretical explanation — until now.

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 minority of climate change research articles have focused on the most vulnerable countries, which also constitute less than 10 percent of associated author affiliations, according to an analysis of climate change research from 2010-2023 published in top-tier journals.

A Spectral Contrastive-Aware Network decodes Zhurong, OMEGA, and CRISM SWIR data, revealing altitude-dependent manganese (hydr)oxide enrichments forming shoreline ‘bathtub rings’ tracing 0.8–1.5-million-year ocean evolution in Utopia Planitia, Mars.

The persistence of urban vulnerability to natural disasters—such as rapidly spreading wildfires—exposes limitations in ecological network planning that overlook ecosystem disservices. This paper critiques prevailing approaches and underscores the urgent need to integrate ecosystem disservices considerations throughout all stages of urban ecological network planning—from problem framing and goal setting to evaluation and implementation—in order to develop more balanced, resilient, and context-sensitive strategies.

Data from Antarctica could help to solve the mystery of why ice ages were so brutal.

Multinational investment is vital for African growth, yet it drives higher rates of forest loss than local industry. Researchers now suggest that home-country laws should hold global firms accountable for their environmental footprint abroad.

As climate change increases the frequency and severity of extreme events, targeted and proactive conservation measures must be implemented to protect endemic tropical island species from the extinction risk posed by cyclones.

Integrating different measures of protected area effectiveness and social outcomes under a quasi-experimental analytical framework highlights tricky trade-offs in implementing ambitious global biodiversity policy.