Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability最新文献

Informal traders, street vendors, and transporters — known as midstream businesses — play a critical role in food systems in the Global South, providing affordable food to low-income households. However, negative impacts relating to these businesses may occur because of unregulated activities, for example, poor working conditions, operating outside of regulation food safety policies, and lack of knowledge around and incentives to enforce adequate hygiene standards. Knowledge on effective approaches to reach out and include informal businesses in enhancing food system outcomes and reducing negative impacts is lacking. This is leading to missed opportunities in achieving zero hunger — Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2 — and other SDGs. There is a need for improved understanding of the motivations, organization, and governance of informal businesses, so policies and interventions can be adjusted to their realities.

In response to the climate and biodiversity crisis, the number of transdisciplinary research projects in which researchers partner with sustainability initiatives to foster transformative change is increasing globally. To enable and catalyze substantial transformative change, transformative transdisciplinary research (TTDR) is urgently needed to provide knowledge and guidance for actions. We review prominent discussions on TTDR and draw on our experiences from research projects in the Global South and North. Drawing on this, we identify key gaps and stimulate debate on how sustainability researchers can enable and catalyze transformative change by advancing five priority areas: clarify what TTDR is, conduct meaningful people-centric research, unpack how to act at deep leverage points, improve engagement with diverse knowledge systems, and explore potentials and risks of global digitalization for transformative change.

In the current scenario characterized by distrust about business contributions to sustainable development, it is necessary to identify new tools to legitimate companies’ operations. The main initiatives launched by supranational institutions and standard setters contributed to this goal by providing new reporting standards to encourage companies to disclose their environmental, social, and governance information on a mandatory or voluntary basis. However, the proliferation of reports prepared by companies with different attitudes toward sustainable development underlined the need to identify alternative accountability mechanisms to restore the signaling effects of adopting these technologies. In particular, a key role is covered by external assurance mechanisms, which represent an emerging research stream in accounting research. According to this evidence, our contribution aims to contribute to this debate through a science mapping of the existing knowledge about external assurance. The insights collected revealed that academics identified a set of information about the main constraints and opportunities related to adopting external assurance mechanisms that could support the recent initiatives launched by international organizations.

Trajectories of human conflict have direct and indirect impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem function. These occur across terrestrial, marine and freshwater systems via the well-established drivers of biodiversity loss: land and sea-use change, climate change, overexploitation, pollution and invasive species. However, the mechanisms underlying the nature of some of these connections are still poorly explored, as is the compilation of existing evidence. Furthermore, indirect drivers, spillover effects, and synergistic relationships between drivers are additional knowledge gaps. Building a full picture requires exploring the magnitude and directionality of impacts within the wider context of socioeconomic change and geopolitics with which conflict is associated. As this knowledge advances, conflict in its diverse forms is likely to emerge as the most overlooked and significant indirect driver of biodiversity loss internationally. Additionally, it is our greatest challenge in achieving sustainable development, specifically due to the primacy of its influence on all other sustainability challenges.

Impact measurement (IM) is an important tool to understand how organizations generate non-financial value, including social and environmental impact. However, if impact is to be actionable, it needs to be considered material and thus included in decision-making. Nevertheless, diverging guidelines and directives around materiality generate confusion, presenting a challenge in linking IM to materiality decisions. This challenge becomes increasingly complex when we consider factors related to sustainability, as it involves the presence of numerous stakeholders, each with their unique perspectives. Understanding what holds significance for these stakeholders through active dialogue and engagement is paramount for meaningful IM. While the intricate nature of materiality has been widely acknowledged in the sustainability reporting literature, a dearth of studies explored the drivers of tensions related to impact materiality in the context of IM. Our study proposes four critical research directions to shed light on these tensions and provide valuable insights into this complex area. For instance, additional empirical studies are needed to assess how impact materiality from a multistakeholder perspective has been embedded in the organizational decision-making process.

Annual global coffee consumption growth (1–2%) has been largely met (>50%) mainly by Brazil and Vietnam through high-input monocrop system adoption. Smallholders account for >80% of global producers and >60% of global supply despite limited farm sizes (<2 ha), yields, and input usage. Production concentration in areas with high-yielding systems has fulfilled global demand growth while keeping coffee prices low. However, climate shocks demonstrate the vulnerability of all supply models, strengthening the voice of those advocating more resilient and diversified systems. We review current agroforestry knowledge to identify key trade-offs and synergies between sustainability/performance indicators (i.e. economic, environmental, and social) and explore pathways for a more sustainable coffee future with three examples representative of global coffee production system diversity.

This piece engages with strands from the literature on the ‘everyday’ [8,9], and also McGregor’s [10] point that climate change impacts can be recorded and victims can be counted. Some of the main strands in the literature are explored by way of critique and some (re)positioning of these ideas as we move into the future. The notion of ‘performativity’ as developed by Butler [11–13], is explored. I offer insights into utilising the notion of acknowledging experience [18] and its connection with giving voice to the silenced in the climate debate. The current debate focuses on the language of risk and calculability [19]. I explore how this might be shifted to focus more positively on opportunities rather than risk [20]. Finally, the notions of futures [21,22], anticipation [23] and agency [24], which might advance and enhance our understanding by being reflective and reflexive with regard to climate change, are presented.

Open system analysis is prone to the oversimplification of dynamics due to tightly coupled variables and their nonlinear, complex, and often unpredictable behavior. By assessing the combination of different ecosystem variables (structural, chemical, and biological) and their dynamic states in time and space, individual complexity measurements can capture phase changes of ecosystem stability and enhance efficiency, disease detection, and ecosystem understanding. This article summarizes the latest developments in complexity research and investigates the potential of metrics to assess and predict the sustainability and resilience of ecosystems, with a particular focus on farming systems. It provides an outlook on improving machine learning approaches by considering the system’s complexity and the necessary data requirements. A GitHub repository [1] is presented that enables practitioners to use complexity applications (e.g. entropy metrics and reconstructed phase spaces). This research provides a deeper understanding of the connections between data complexity, machine learning algorithms, and environmental modeling.

The climate change debate in South Asia is deeply embedded in the broader frameworks of colonialism, technonationalist pride, national sovereignty, and distributive justice. The highly diverse and climate-vulnerable geographies that stretch between the Himalayas and tropical islands in the Indian Ocean, alongside the irreconcilable geopolitical rivalries in this region, make it a critical site of inquiry into concepts of resilience, development, and climate security in the Anthropocene. The article reviews the major debates and arguments surrounding the Anthropocene and its conceptual implications for the developing world. It highlights the role of colonialism, asymmetric power, and postcolonial developmentalism in shaping the politics and negotiating tactics of climate change in South Asia. Furthermore, it maps the emergent scholarship on resilience and climate security in the region that is engaging with the Anthropocene in the global South and foregrounding issues on the right to development, security, marginalisation of the poor, and climate vulnerability.

Food systems are intricate and diverse and face unprecedented challenges owing to rising food demand and resource competition. Recent studies have highlighted that the nexus approach can unveil synergies and trade-offs among sectors, making it useful for sustainable food system studies. Our study reviews the nexus research, addresses knowledge gaps and critiques and explores innovations in nexus concepts from 2020 to 2022. Many studies have overlooked resource-intensive food processing and consumption phases while neglecting inter-regional interactions. Few studies have considered the interlinks between socioeconomic, resource and eco-environmental indicators, hindering the comprehensive and accurate quantification of the impacts of food systems on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We emphasise the need for a comprehensive framework that embraces multi-sector, multi-scale and multi-regional perspectives, covers a series of indicators of resource use efficiency and depletion, environmental pollution and protection and socioeconomic development and achieves a sustainable food system and the achievement of SDGs.