Volume 1 Issue 3, March 2018

Professor Anu Ramaswami of the Advisory Committee on Environmental Research and Education discusses their newly published report about the next generation of sustainable urban systems science with Nature Sustainability.

Current global models omit the complex, unpredictable behaviours that socio-environmental systems exhibit. Now researchers have proposed a city- and trade-based integrated model that includes these behaviours and explained its use for food and water security research.

An analysis of dietary changes in China and their environmental impact between 1997 and 2011 reveals distinct trends between rural and urban areas, and an overall increase in greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption and land appropriation, driven mainly by the increase of meat consumption.

A framed field experiment in five countries shows that Payments for Ecosystem Services increase forest conservation, that communication contributes to payment effectiveness and that positive effects outlast payments.

A unique dataset of over 550 programmes of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) worldwide, grouped into water, forest- and land-use carbon, and biodiversity programmes, is used to assess the trends and the current status of such policy instruments.

A curated global dataset of Payments for Environmental Services (PES) reveals that theoretical principles are only partially applied in practice, particularly conditionality, which makes payments underperform.