Peer-reviewed publications

Coastal ecosystems have the potential to contribute to disaster risk reduction and adaptation to climate change. While previous studies have estimated the value of current coastal ecosystems for reducing coastal risk, there have been relatively few studies that look at changes in ecosystem service provision, in the past and under climate change. We employ the probabilistic, event-based CLIMADA platform to quantify the protection from tropical cyclones provided by coastal ecosystems, modeling the number of beneficiaries in the past and under future climate change. We also investigate the potential of Nature-based Solutions (NbS), such as mangrove restoration. We find that currently, one in five (21%) of all people impacted annually by tropical cyclones in the global low-elevation coastal zone is within the protection distance of coastal ecosystems. Over the last 30 years, the share of protected people has decreased by approximately 2%, due to ecosystem loss. With climate change, the average annual number of people impacted will increase by 40%. Simultaneously, the proportion of people protected by coastal ecosystems with climate change decreases due to changes in tropical cyclone distribution (-1%). The importance of current coastal protection, and the potential for increasing protection by NbS, varies widely between countries. While the number of people protected globally only increases slightly with mangrove restoration, protection in individual countries can increase by up to 39%. Our findings provide a basis for NbS planning and adaptation policy, by highlighting areas which will be crucial for coastal protection services in a world altered by climate change.

Encyclopedia of Biodiversity, Third Edition, Seven Volume Set provides a coherent, synthetic and comprehensive overview of the field, bringing together contributions from over 400 expert academics and practitioners. The book brings together the dimensions of biodiversity and examines the services it provides and measures to protect it. Major themes include the evolution of biodiversity, systems for classifying and defining biodiversity, ecological patterns and theories of biodiversity, and an assessment of contemporary patterns and trends in biodiversity. The entire work is reviewed and updated, including new chapters on topics which have come to the forefront since the publication of the previous edition. The science of biodiversity has become the science of our future. It is an interdisciplinary field spanning areas of both physical and life sciences. Our awareness of the loss of biodiversity has brought a long overdue appreciation of the magnitude of this loss and a determination to develop the tools to protect our future. One important feature of the new edition will be updated information on the growing biodiversity crisis.

In August 2022 we launched the inaugural issue of a new Nature journal focused on our blue planet: npj Ocean Sustainability. The opening issue highlighted the journal’s intended role in sharing research, critically debating key challenges to achieving ocean sustainability, with its environmental and human dimensions, and advancing pathways to address them.

In just 1 year, the journal’s interdisciplinarity and solution-oriented nature have shone through and made it stand out among prestigious journals. Covered topics were diverse (Fig. 1), ranging from the challenges of seabed mining to the new agreement on marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction, to fisheries management, climate change impacts, global science-policy interfaces, human connections with ocean spaces, and digital twins. Many papers address different ocean sectors simultaneously, integrating different disciplines and different dimensions of ocean sustainability challenges (e.g., biodiversity loss, pollution, over-exploitation of species).

Monitoring the governance and management effectiveness of area-based conservation has long been recognized as an important foundation for achieving national and global biodiversity goals and enabling adaptive management. However, there are still many barriers that prevent conservation actors, including those affected by governance and management systems from implementing conservation activities and programs and from gathering and using data on governance and management to inform decision-making across spatial scales and through time. We explored current and past efforts to assess governance and management effectiveness and barriers actors face in using the resulting data and insights to inform conservation decision-making. To help overcome these barriers, we developed Elinor, a free and open-source monitoring tool that builds on the work of Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom to facilitate the gathering, storing, sharing, analyzing, and use of data on environmental governance and management across spatial scales and for areas under different governance and management types. We consider the process of codesigning and piloting Elinor with conservation scientists and practitioners and the main components of the assessment and online data system. We also consider how Elinor complements existing approaches by addressing governance and management in a single assessment at a high level for different types of area-based conservation, providing flexible options for data collection, and integrating a data system with an assessment that can support data use and sharing across different spatial scales, including global monitoring of the Global Biodiversity Framework. Although challenges will continue, the process of developing Elinor and the tool itself offer tangible solutions to barriers that prevent the systematic collection and use of governance and management data. With broader uptake, Elinor can play a valuable role in enabling more effective, inclusive, and durable area-based conservation.

Nature-based interventions (NbIs) for climate change mitigation include a diverse set of interventions aimed at conserving, restoring, and/or managing natural and modified ecosystems to improve their ability to store and sequester carbon and avoid greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Recent projections estimate that terrestrial NbIs can lead to more than one-third of the climate change mitigation necessary to meet the Paris Climate Agreement by 2030. Further, these interventions can provide co-benefits in the form of social and ecological outcomes. Despite growing recognition of the potential benefits, a clear characterization of the distribution and occurrence of evidence which supports linkages between different types of NbIs and outcomes for climate change mitigation, ecosystems, and people remains poorly understood.

The magnitude of global food loss and waste requires a major overhaul of economies and food supply chains to reduce food insecurity, environmental burdens, and economic losses. Reducing food loss and waste and improving access and distribution to feed hungry people are the highest priorities. The next highest value is converting energy and nutrients in food waste (FW) materials into animal feeds to produce more food while recovering resources and reducing environmental costs. Governments in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have developed laws, regulations, economic incentives, subsidies, and infrastructure to require collection and recycling of all sources of FW and promote the conversion of a high proportion (>65 %) to safe animal feed. Many countries have extensive laws and regulations designed to prevent transmission of animal diseases that could occur from feeding FW, but those in the U.S. and E.U. are too restrictive based on current heat processing technology and monitoring systems available, resulting in only 5–10 % of available FW used in animal feeds. In China, despite difficulties controlling African swine fever virus, new government initiatives show promise for developing guidelines, infrastructure, and processes for diverting more of the 350 million tonnes of annual FW toward safe animal feed.

The magnitude of global food loss and waste requires a major overhaul of economies and food supply chains to reduce food insecurity, environmental burdens, and economic losses. Reducing food loss and waste and improving access and distribution to feed hungry people are the highest priorities. The next highest value is converting energy and nutrients in food waste (FW) materials into animal feeds to produce more food while recovering resources and reducing environmental costs. Governments in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have developed laws, regulations, economic incentives, subsidies, and infrastructure to require collection and recycling of all sources of FW and promote the conversion of a high proportion (>65 %) to safe animal feed. Many countries have extensive laws and regulations designed to prevent transmission of animal diseases that could occur from feeding FW, but those in the U.S. and E.U. are too restrictive based on current heat processing technology and monitoring systems available, resulting in only 5–10 % of available FW used in animal feeds. In China, despite difficulties controlling African swine fever virus, new government initiatives show promise for developing guidelines, infrastructure, and processes for diverting more of the 350 million tonnes of annual FW toward safe animal feed.

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are an important tool to protect marine biodiversity that can have substantial impacts on human well-being. However, such social impacts are rarely considered proactively. Proponents must work collectively and proactively to better understand and communicate future well-being impacts while co-creating lasting solutions prior to MPA development and iteratively during ongoing management.

Evidence-informed decision-making can help catalyze the development and implementation of effective conservation actions. Yet despite decades of research on evidence-informed conservation, its realization within conservation implementing agencies and organizations still faces challenges. First, conservation decisions are shaped by individual, organizational, and systemic factors that operate and interact across different temporal and spatial scales. Second, the different cultures and value systems within conservation implementing agencies fuels continued debate on what can and should count as evidence for decision-making, and ultimately shapes how evidence is used in practice. While the importance of evidence-informed conservation is increasingly recognized, we have witnessed few changes within conservation implementing agencies that could enable better engagement with diverse types of evidence and knowledge holders. Based on our experience supporting monitoring, evaluation and learning systems in conservation implementing agencies, we argue that to realize evidence-informed conservation we need a better understanding of the process and context of conservation decision-making within organizations, an alignment of institutional systems and processes that generate evidence relevant to information needs, and changes that help conservation organizations become learning organizations. These actions could help transform how conservation practitioners and organizations learn to enable more evidence-informed decision-making within the complex systems they work in.

Feed use in aquaculture results in large amounts of embodied land, freshwater, energy and wild fish use. Selection of feed ingredients at feed mills can reduce the amounts of one or more of the four major natural resources embodied in feed. However, better feed management to lessen FCR is more likely the key to lessening resource use at the farm level. Of course, lessening the FCR will reduce the amount of feed that must be purchased and diminish the direct and embodied negative environmental impacts associated with feed. It also is important to note that mechanical aeration applied in many methods of production requires more energy than associated with feed alone. Aeration is necessary for high feed inputs required in intensive production, and without aeration, most types of intensive production would not be possible. The amounts of resource use attributed to feeding and aeration were applied in estimating the resulting quantities of water pollutants in effluents and emission of atmospheric contaminants. Some of the misunderstandings about life cycle assessment (LCA) such as it usually covering all impacts of product systems, and especially its failure to assess the oxygen demand of effluents are mentioned.