One Earth最新文献

The intertwined crises of biodiversity loss and climate change pose a significant sustainability challenge, threatening ecosystems and human well-being globally. Yet, the nuanced interplay between these challenges is often understated in policy dialogs. Global biodiversity targets, including 30% protection of the Earth’s surface by 2030, may fall short without robust climate change mitigation. Here, we illustrate that conservation through protected areas can effectively preserve forest productivity and carbon capture, which depend on tree diversity. However, failing to mitigate climate change diminishes the effectiveness of these areas, especially in warmer biomes. Even with optimal protected area selection, preserving tree diversity-dependent productivity could be compromised without significant climate change mitigation. Our findings emphasize the need to integrate climate change mitigation into biodiversity conservation policies to ensure the success of the 30 × 30 targets and sustain the ecosystem benefits biodiversity provides to society.

Soil phosphorus (P) directly impacts major sustainability outcomes, namely crop yields, water quality, and carbon sequestration. Optimally managing P to improve sustainability outcomes requires a mechanistic understanding of P availability and transfer, alongside high-resolution spatial data. However, it is unclear if current measurement techniques, models, and maps meet the demands for science-informed management. Here, we review recent advances in measuring P fluxes, quantifying P availability, and mapping soil P resources and discuss implications for sustainability outcomes. We find that the understanding of soil P availability has significantly improved but that agronomical applications and climate models are still largely based on outdated concepts. Also, we find that spatial data on soil P resources are highly uncertain, limiting the usefulness of current P maps. We highlight steps to improve existing tools and emphasize that these improvements need to go hand in hand with policy and technological development to successfully address P-related sustainable development goals.

Summers have always been hot, but we are experiencing exceedingly intensive heat across the world. Global temperature records break headlines more frequently thanks to anthropogenic climate change. In response to the deadly heatwave of 2020—which engulfed Europe with record-breaking temperatures and caused tens of thousands of deaths—artist and climate activist Diane Burko created Summer Heat. This 7 × 13 ft painting illustrates the causes and effects of climate change clashing into each other by displaying the Earth’s continents underneath splashes of red and blue, which reflect on the EU record-breaking heat and melting glaciers, dripping across the canvas, juxtaposed with the iconic Keeling curve that presents the accumulation of CO₂ in the Earth’s atmosphere based on continuous measurements taken at the Mauna Loa Observatory since 1958. This artwork was further used in a study and showed its positive influence on bridging political divisions in climate change.

International research in Global South cities is urgently needed to address unprecedented heat, enervating humidity, and daunting social inequality projected to impact >3 billion urbanites in Asia and Africa. Yet, researchers are ill-equipped to navigate cultural and physiological challenges inherent in this work, for which we develop cross-cultural protocols.

Cities worldwide face growing heat risks but still mostly lack comprehensive and coordinated efforts to address heat hazards. Emerging urban heat governance systems should integrate disciplines and sectors to holistically and equitably mitigate and manage heat through goals, data, action, evaluation, and public participation across different governance instruments and jurisdictional scales.

Dr. Radhika Khosla, associate professor at the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment, research director of the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development, and the Principle Investigator of the Oxford Martin School’s interdisciplinary and multi-country program on the future of cooling, recently spoke with One Earth about challenges facing cities in a warming world and potential solutions. The views expressed by Shikha Bhasin are hers only and not necessarily those of the University of Oxford.