Nature Food最新文献

Rice is the staple food for half of the world’s population but also has the largest water footprint among cereal crops. Alternate wetting and drying (AWD) is a promising irrigation strategy to improve paddy rice’s water productivity—defined as the ratio of rice yield to irrigation water use. However, its global adoption has been limited due to concerns about potential yield losses and uncertainties regarding water productivity improvements. Here, using 1,187 paired field observations of rice yield under AWD and continuous flooding to quantify AWD effects (ΔY), we found that variation in ΔY is predominantly explained by the lowest soil water potential during the drying period. We estimate that implementing a soil water potential-based AWD scheme could increase water productivity across 37% of the global irrigated rice area, particularly in India, Bangladesh and central China. These findings highlight the potential of AWD to promote more sustainable rice production systems and provide a pathway toward the sustainable intensification of rice cultivation worldwide.

Nitrogen (N) losses from croplands substantially contribute to global N pollution. Assessing the reduction in N losses through improved N management practices is complex due to varying site conditions, such as land use, climate, soil properties and local farming methods. In this Article, we conducted a meta-analysis to evaluate the effects of improved practices on N loss reduction, analysing data from 1,065 studies with 6,753 pairs of observations comparing standard and optimized practices. Without considering site-specific conditions, optimized management practices can reduce N₂O emissions by 3–39%, NH₃ emissions by 15–68%, N run-off by 21–37% and N leaching by 19–52%. After considering local conditions and current practices, average reductions on a global scale were 31% for N₂O, 23% for NH₃, 18% for N run-off and 17% for N leaching. The effectiveness of N loss reduction was mainly influenced by optimized management practices and, to a lesser extent, site conditions. The results of this study underscore the importance of implementing optimized, site-specific management to effectively reduce N losses from global croplands.

Carbon removal from the atmosphere is needed to keep global mean temperature increases below 2 °C. Here, we develop a model to explore how alkalinity production through enhanced iron sulfide formation in low-oxygen aquatic environments, such as aquaculture systems, could offer a cost-effective means of CO₂ removal. We show that enhanced sulfide burial through the supply of reactive iron to surface sediments may be able to capture up to a hundred million tonnes of CO₂ per year, particularly in countries with the highest number of fish farms, such as China and Indonesia. These efforts could largely offset the carbon footprint associated with their aquaculture industry. Enhanced sulfide burial could directly benefit both fish farms and surrounding ecosystems by removing toxic sulfide from aquatic systems, providing an addition to durable global CO₂ removal markets and a path towards large-scale, carbon-neutral aquatic food production.

Reducing meat consumption can help improve environmental and health outcomes, yet the effect of specific meat-reducing strategies is context dependent. Here, using decomposition analysis of National Diet and Nutrition Survey data (2008–2009 to 2018–2019), we found that in the United Kingdom, reduced meat portions had the largest impact on total meat consumption decline (52%), followed by fewer meat-eating days (24%), fewer meat consumers (17%) and fewer meat-eating meal occasions (7%). Understanding meat consumption behaviour patterns is key for more effective policies.

In May 2024, the EU adopted the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive³. The directive requires companies to carry out a human rights and environmental due diligence process to prevent, mitigate and address their own potential or actual adverse human rights and environmental impacts, as well as those of their subsidiaries and those arising in their global chains of activities. The directive is the latest development in BHR, following the adoption in 2011 by the United Nations Human Rights Council of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. These guiding principles are non-binding but have inspired government and company policies around the world to move towards more corporate accountability. This BHR approach prioritizes corporate accountability and is shaped by international human rights law, thus going beyond voluntary corporate social responsibility.

The directive introduces ‘responsible business conduct’ as an additional component of sustainability. While focusing on very large companies (with more than 1,000 employees and a minimum annual turnover of €450 million), the directive emphasizes that all businesses have the responsibility to respect human rights, which are universal, indivisible, interdependent and interrelated. Therefore, smaller companies along the value chain are also encouraged to have responsible conduct, in line with human rights — including economic and social rights — and environmental international standards, and more broadly with the BHR approach.