One Earth最新文献

Nature-based climate solutions (NbCSs) could play an important role in meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement. The contribution approach offers an alternative model to carbon offsetting for funding NbCSs. This paper presents three crucial design principles to help ensure the contribution approach results in high-quality climate and other benefits and avoids harms.

Large swaths of land are regularly converted to the production of commodities—goods that can be traded on a large scale in the global market via telecoupled systems. While commodity-driven land use can contribute significantly to national economies, it often leads to unsustainable land-grabbing practices and can exacerbate inequalities, damage biodiversity, or extract resources unsustainably. This Voices seeks to understand the challenges and opportunities of managing commodity-driven land use in telecoupled systems.

Batteries, essential for a net-zero future, are highly dependent on critical metals, the extraction and supply of which inflict harm on society and the environment and are subject to geopolitical tensions. To reduce damages and secure supply, the EU has introduced ambitious targets for end-of-life battery recycling and critical metal recovery; however, the feasibility of such targets remains unclear. Here, to explore the impacts of the EU’s proposed recycled content (RC) targets on battery material circularly, we develop a comprehensive material flow analysis model for the EU’s lithium-ion batteries and consider different climate targets and battery chemistries, lifespans, and repurposing rates. Results show that achieving the EU’s RC targets in 2036, especially for cobalt, is challenging. The RC targets become more achievable via, e.g., maintaining a high rate of manufacturing waste, disincentivizing battery repurposing, and forcing the early retirement of batteries, which could, however, undermine battery material circularity. Our analysis suggests that the EU should remain flexible in its RC targets.

We provide an inter-industry perspective that illuminates why and how sustainable forest management is so elusive in the tropics. We offer a novel, integrated industrial system that would enable a paradigm shift for tropical forestry, so that increasing demands for forest products can drive positive outcomes for people, nature, and climate.

Citizen assemblies (CAs) could enrich policymaking by unveiling public values and preferences for climate polices. Yet, the current paradigm guiding CAs is rationalistic and primarily fact orientated. This might underexploit the potential of CAs to bring a unique contribution to climate policymaking. I propose a paradigm shift that creates explicit room for citizens’ values in CAs. Using concrete examples, I illustrate how every step of CAs could be transformed to elicit citizens’ values: from citizen selection, to setting the remit, facilitating the discussion, and shaping and institutionalizing policy recommendations.

Little is known about the impending mental health impacts of the global nature crisis. Existing evidence largely overlooks how nature sustains the economic and material dimensions of people’s lives that support their mental health. Moreover, this evidence poorly represents the context-dependent experiences of billions living in the rural Global South. Here, we offer a framework illustrating how nature’s essential contributions to people underpin multiple social determinants of mental health. We explore how the loss of those contributions (e.g., fisheries collapse) may exacerbate social determinants (e.g., poverty) of poor mental health. We examine how biodiversity conservation may affect mental health by altering the flow of nature’s contributions, regulating access to those contributions, generating direct impacts through projects, and tackling the underlying drivers of nature loss (illustrated in an empirically based scenario analysis in Uganda). A better understanding can guide policy and practice to simultaneously tackle nature loss while protecting and enhancing mental health globally.

Agricultural soils are often overlooked sources of human and animal pathogenic bacteria, which can cause a range of food-, air-, and waterborne diseases. The awareness of pathogens in soil is as old as that in modern microbiology, but we still know little about the factors driving their global distribution. Here, we compiled 342 pairs of bulk and rhizosphere soil microbiomes to identify 9,516 potential pathogenic amplicon sequence variants (ASVs), 75% of which were human-animal pathogens. The relative abundance and diversity of these pathogens in the rhizosphere were 81% and 11% higher, respectively, compared to bulk soils. Most of these pathogens are opportunistic, and 11 keystone species in the rhizosphere have been reported as human gut pathogens. Through different agricultural management practices, we revealed that increasing microbial diversity reduces pathogen prevalence. This study aligns the interest of sustainable food production and public health by providing incentives for the redesign of food production systems.

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) includes a specific target for reducing businesses’ negative impacts on biodiversity and increasing their positive impacts to contribute toward the GBF mission and vision. “Nature Positive” is also emerging as a rallying call for mainstreaming the GBF. Merely tinkering with business as usual will not deliver these ambitions; transformative change is needed. However, how to operationalize transformative change toward Nature Positive and the GBF through meaningful actions and targets remains unclear, risking confusion, greenwashing, and failure to achieve global goals. This perspective draws on literature on social change to offer a practical framework for understanding and operationalizing transformative change for business toward a Nature Positive future. We define and describe the role of transformative change within a Nature Positive ambition and summarize the different types and scales of actions companies could take. This framework could help to plan mutually reinforcing actions and improve accountability for Nature Positive claims.

Soil microbes regulate various biogeochemical cycles on Earth and respond rapidly to climate change, which is accompanied by changes in soil pH. However, the long-term patterns of these changes under future climate scenarios remain unclear. We propose a core-bacteria-forecast model (CoBacFM) to model soil pH changes by shifts of core bacterial groups under future scenarios using a curated soil microbiota dataset of global grasslands. Our model estimates that soil pH will increase in 63.8%–67.0% of grassland regions and decrease in 10.1%–12.4% of regions. Approximately 32.5%–32.9% of regions will become more alkaline by 5.6%, and these areas expand in all future scenarios. These results were supported by 14 warming simulation experiments. Using bacterial responses as bioindicators of soil pH, the CoBacFM method can accurately forecast pH changes in future scenarios, and the changing global climate is likely to result in the alkalization of grasslands.