Volume 8 Issue 4, April 2025

Membranes supporting selective ion transport provide the opportunity to generate electricity from water sources with different salt concentrations. Now researchers report a strategy to align nanochannels in covalent organic framework membranes for unprecedented performance in osmotic energy harvesting.

Waste-to-nutrition pathways convert organic waste into food for people and livestock. Simulations of nine future scenarios in France reveal that the potential of five such pathways for reducing the environmental impacts of food and waste systems depends on process efficiencies, availability of low-carbon energy and the extent to which novel foods replace meat.

While adaptation to climate and environmental impacts is assumed for future development, this Perspective provides evidence that adaptation may be more limited or even undermined by climate change, requiring difficult societal decisions to be made.

History can enhance the robustness of scenario planning for the food system. Through cases in Mozambique, Bangladesh and Holland, this Perspective illustrates how historical insights can guide interventions on various scales for more resilient food systems.

Biodiversity offsetting policies are increasing in number and variety around the world, but the process of moving from conceiving offsettings to implementing them is not always clear. This Review synthesizes evidence on how the main actors influence offset policies to support efforts towards developing more sustainable biodiversity offsetting.

Agroforestry is a natural climate solution providing ecological and socio-economic benefits at local scales, however whether it reduces deforestation at landscape scale is still unclear. Authors use causal inference to examine the effects of agroforestry on deforestation across Southeast Asia.

Satellites have become integral to our everyday life, but space debris threatens the sustainability of low Earth orbital space. Greenhouse gases are complicating the problem, leading to longer orbital retention of defunct satellites and increasing the risk of collision.

Understanding the urbanization-driven vegetation dynamics is currently limited but would be important knowledge to guide sustainable urban development. This study explores such impacts across 4,718 cities worldwide and reveals divergent dynamics of vegetation loss and urban vegetation growth.

Efforts to curb environmental effects of food systems have led to the development of ‘waste-to-nutrition’ pathways that process bioresidues into food and feed products such as microbial proteins and insects. This paper examines the environmental mitigation potential of such pathways across France.

Environmental impacts of agriculture can be difficult to assess due to limitations in current environmental sustainability indicators of crop production. This study develops a robust crop-specific environmental sustainability index that helps assess corporate sustainability strategies and policy.

Fabricating high-performance cellulose fibres is desirable for the development of sustainable materials, but remains challenging. Here the authors report a draw spinning/de-acetylation method to fabricate cellulose fibres that exhibit mechanical strength exceeding that of existing fibre materials.

Developing recyclable circular plastics is a viable approach to reshape the currently unsustainable plastics consumption pattern. Here the authors show a design to obtain recyclable polyolefin plastics with a tailored macromonomer–polymer–tailored macromonomer circular lifecycle.

As a ‘safe’ alternative to harmful monomeric halogenated flame retardants, the use of polymeric flame retardants has surged in recent years. The authors show that polymeric flame retardants break down in the environment into small toxic molecules that can pose environmental hazards.

This work shows a strategy to engineer the orientation of covalent organic framework membranes to an axis-aligned configuration that enables record performance for osmotic energy harvesting.

Wide-bandgap perovskites are critical to tandem solar cells for maximized solar energy capture and efficiency, but their stability remains a major issue. Here, by introducing reductive cations, the authors realize scalable fabrication of large-area solar cells in ambient conditions with good performance.