Volume 3 Issue 4, April 2020

The global food system must become more sustainable. Digital agriculture — digital and geospatial technologies to monitor, assess and manage soil, climatic and genetic resources — illustrates how to meet this challenge so as to balance the economic, environmental and social dimensions of sustainable food production.

Energy fuels, and is central to, all physical and biological systems, including the human population and economy. Yet science has missed the significance of civilization’s growing energy consumption. The energetics of the global food system illustrate the counterintuitive aspects of present energy consumption circumstances.

Can economic growth be made greener, or must we look beyond growth to achieve sustainability? An important new study shows that the pursuit of ‘green growth’ would increase inequality and unemployment unless accompanied by radical social policies.

This Perspective argues for a global research prioritization framework to advance sustainable intensification, an increase in agricultural yields on existing land and respecting ecosystem integrity, noting research gaps and suggesting priorities.

Increasing urbanization will lead to a significant expansion of buildings and related infrastructure, major sources of greenhouse gas emissions. This Perspective discusses the possibility of constructing mid-rise urban buildings with engineered timber for long-term carbon storage and carbon emissions reduction.

Climate change is driving fishery stocks out of their historic ranges. This study finds that the risk of such fishery exits is greatest in the tropics and that policy frameworks are poorly equipped to grapple with this challenge.

Agriculture has a massive and growing footprint. This study finds that optimizing fertilizer and major crops globally could reduce by 50% needed global cropland, allowing restored vegetation on spared land to sequester carbon.

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon affects both older (primary) and younger (secondary) forests. This study finds that most forest loss over the period 2008–2014 was from secondary forests and that the almost 190% rise in deforestation buffered losses from primary forests.

Two-dimensional lamellar membranes for water purification are promising but suffer from swelling that reduces their ion sieving performance in water. This study reports easy-to-fabricate, non-swelling MXene membranes prepared by the intercalation of Al³⁺ ions that could be scalable.

Physicochemical treatments of heavy-metal pollution in waste water have several environmental and structural disadvantages. This Article shows that sulfide-producing yeasts are able to remove mercury, lead and copper from real-world water samples and offer a platform for metal re-extraction.

Inequality—wealth concentration among few people—stimulates direct foreign investment in agriculture, leading to flex-crop expansion and associated deforestation in Latin America and Southeast Asia, as found in this econometric study.

Water use in river basins is an age-old resource-management question, but it is rare to quantify consumption by specific sectors. The Colorado River is being overused for beef and dairy production, endangering the entire river ecosystem.

A dynamic macrosimulation study of three scenarios finds that policies for social prosperity and low-carbon emissions are economically and politically feasible.

Conservation agriculture prioritizes soil health and diverse cropping systems. This meta-analysis finds multiple benefits, including for water conservation and profitability, from conservation-agriculture practices in South Asia.