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Global agreement on 30×30 means an unprecedented last push to define how much nature will be left on the planet. At the same time that space for nature is being defined, climate change will be moving nature around. Species are now on the move to track climate change both on land and in the oceans, a process that is accelerating under dramatic new extreme events. This is an opportune time to review conservation recommendations made early in the millennium, to see how many have been taken on board over the past 20 years, and how much is left to be done to adapt to climate change as conservation pushes toward 30×30. The history of Climate Change–Integrated Conservation Strategies begins with two papers published by a group of prominent climate change biologists in 2002. The importance of including adaptation to climate change in conservation was underscored by the first estimates of extinction risk due to climate change in 2004. Subsequent literature has developed concepts such as velocity of climate change and assisted migration. Regional modeling of biodiversity change, expanding protected areas to facilitate species range movements, and managing productive landscapes to facilitate species movements are all now considered "business as usual" for conservation planning for climate change. Regional coordination of conservation efforts to ensure that species on the move are managed for climate change consistently across their range, on the other hand, is under-represented in literature and practice. Improving both theory and practice of regional coordination for climate change is an important priority for conservation now and in the future. Conservation for climate change has focused mostly on warming scenarios, but failure to act on climate change emissions reduction means that meeting Paris Agreement targets will almost certainly have to include both warming past those targets and subsequent cooling back to the target. Managing this double transition is a second critical point of emphasis for climate change biology as the world moves to 30×30. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the present state of insects, describing their taxonomic position, cost, and value as well as the threats to their well-being. Insects are an important source of both ecosystem services and ecosystem disservices. Recent studies have indicated a worrying decline in insect species, especially in flying insects in the northern temperate region, and this has spawned much media attention. Some decline has occurred, it is clear, due to agricultural intensification, urbanization, overuse of pesticides, and global climate change. A decline would seriously affect the ecosystem services that insects provide. However, there is too little data to warrant the belief that all insects are declining everywhere. There is a pressing need for more basic research on insect diversity in the context of a changing world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the past decade, the attribution of extreme weather events and their impacts has enabled scientists, the public, and policymakers alike to connect real-world experiences of extreme weather events with scientific understanding of anthropogenic climate change. Attribution studies of recent extreme weather events have formed a new and important line of evidence in the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report understanding present-day impacts of climate change. IPCC studies using different methods of event attribution have been assessed together, highlighting that these differences are smaller than the academic discourse on the methods suggests. This development raised two important research questions the science needs to answer: First, how do we formally combine attribution statements using highly conditional methods with probabilistic assessments of how climate change alters the likelihood and intensity of extreme weather events? Second, under what circumstances are individual attribution studies still necessary and to what extent do existing attribution studies provide enough information to answer societal questions? Furthermore, the scientific development still leaves important gaps, particularly in countries of the Global South, leading to ethical questions around the need and requirement of attribution of extreme events in policy contexts, informing adaptation and loss and damage and the role of vulnerability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polarization in the United States and around the world is of growing concern. Polarization is about more than just differences in opinions in society. It occurs when groups increasingly diverge in either actual or perceived differences in opinion and can involve both disagreements about issues and negative views of other groups. Since most environmental problems are collective action problems, polarization may interfere with the kinds of deliberation and collaborations needed for effective environmental decision-making. In this review, we examine how polarization influences environmental decision-making and what strategies could be useful for preventing or reducing the negative consequences of polarization. Evidence about the extent of polarization among citizens suggests the current situation may be less severe than is sometimes assumed. The coevolution of individual views, network interactions, and social media that cause polarization is complex and subject to rapid change. However, there are interventions that seem to be effective at reducing polarization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Qualitative research methods examine a wide range of topics in the study of environment and resource management. This first review on the topic highlights innovative and impactful research over the past few decades, drawing from social science disciplines that include sociology, geography, anthropology, political science, public policy, and psychology. We describe qualitative research methods that have addressed five scientific goals: (a) describing what the world is like, (b) predicting what the world can be like, (c) acknowl-edging researcher positionality and reflexivity and diversifying ways of knowing in theorizing and research designs, (d) integrating imaginaries into empirical research and building narratives to make sense of possible futures and to broaden our view of scientific inquiry, and (e) helping scholars grapple with the deep complexity of socioecological systems. As we explore these themes, we explain foundational qualitative approaches and highlight examples of environmental qualitative research that apply them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coastal systems are sensitive to direct and indirect impacts of climate change. Approximately 90% of all coastal areas will be affected by climate change to varying degrees. Nearly half of the world's major cities are located within 50 km of a coast, and coastal population densities are 2.6 times greater than those of inland areas, with a steep rise over the years. While coastal critical infrastructure is expanding, more social and physical systems are increasingly exposed to climate-induced hazards. The interconnectedness and interdependencies of critical infrastructure systems increase their systemic instability and fragility, resulting in greater dynamic risk and cascading impacts. Coastal critical infrastructure systems on several continents are at risk from the effects of climate change, including sea level rise, storm surges, and extreme weather events. Therefore, it is necessary to build and run climate-resilient infrastructure that is planned, designed, implemented, and operated to predict, be prepared for, and adapt to changing climatic circumstances. This review provides an up-to-date, objective, and critical assessment based on the literature to help determine what is known and what needs the future attention of researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the results of more than 20 different global models with a particular emphasis on two rapidly growing large countries (China and India), this paper discusses the cost estimation methods that are used in setting up information for organizing models and to illustrate their global applicability to China, Korea, Japan, India, Indonesia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and the United States. Some clear points emerge from the intermodal comparison exercise. First, no single technology can play a leading role in global emission mitigation. Second, although participation of all the regions is important, regions where future demographic and economic growth is concentrated will share a large part of this burden. Third, different technologies are important for different regions for mitigating emissions in the most cost-effective way. Fourth, if stringent climate policy targets are to be met, then emission-reduction actions need to be undertaken as soon as possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extent to which natural capital can be substituted with manufactured or human capital in production is a key determinant of the possibility of long-run sustainable economic development. We review empirical literature pertaining to the degree of substitutability between natural capital and other forms of capital. We find that most available substitutability estimates do not stand up to careful scrutiny. Moreover, accurate substitutability estimates are even more difficult to produce for unpriced or mispriced resources. Finally, we provide evidence from industrial energy use, and agricultural land use, that suggests substitutability of natural capital with other forms of capital may be low to moderate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To appreciate the beauty or the fragility of our environment and our cultural responses to it, we need to understand how artists have portrayed the environment in the past and how they are continuing to portray it in the present. Environmental art is presented in this paper as a new genre to describe works of art that are not only directly representational of the environment (e.g., Constable's Cloud Series or Monet's London Series) but also works of art that are clearly nonrepresentational and performative, such as Long's A Line Made by Walking or Turrell's Skyspaces. The need for an overarching new genre to describe nonrepresentational performative environmental art is more obvious because there has been a host of labels given to this type of art since the late 1960s, such as land art, earthworks, site-specific art, destination art, ecological art, eco-art, and environmental sculpture. The review is also concerned with the potential of environmental art for communicating climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ocean holds vast quantities of carbon that it continually exchanges with the atmosphere through the air-sea interface. Because of its enormous size and relatively rapid exchange of carbon with the atmosphere, the ocean controls atmospheric CO2 concentration and thereby Earth's climate on timescales of tens to thousands of years. This review examines the basic functions of the ocean's carbon cycle, demonstrating that the ocean carbon inventory is determined primarily by the mass of the ocean, by the chemical speciation of CO2 in seawater, and by the action of the solubility and biological pumps that draw carbon into the ocean's deeper layers, where it can be sequestered for decades to millennia. The ocean also plays a critical role in moderating the impacts of climate change by absorbing an amount of carbon equivalent to about 25% of anthropogenic CO2 emissions over the past several decades. However, this also leads to ocean acidification and reduces the chemical buffering capacity of the ocean and its future ability to take up CO2. This review closes with a look at the uncertain future of the ocean carbon cycle and the scientific challenges that this uncertainty brings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article undertakes a comprehensive review of tourism's impacts on social-ecological systems and the use of the local to global commons. It examines a wide range of issues from climate change and air travel to biodiversity loss, pollution, and overtourism. It reinforces that tourism in modernity has pursued a dominant growth-driven paradigm of development and market expansion that is unsustainable. The review raises critical questions about how to move forward in the Anthropocene, where climate change is an existential threat to which travel and tourism must adjust. We offer directions for knowledge creation to develop nature-positive tourism that decouples from greenhouse gas emissions and seeks the regeneration of natural capital and communal health and well-being. This direction includes rethinking the purposes and values of tourism by addressing equity and ethical issues. It also calls for inclusivity of diverse worldviews and knowledge systems, including traditional and Indigenous knowledge. Such a pluralistic paradigm replaces the unsustainable modernist tourism paradigm that has dominated its evolution. We conclude with suggestions for research to advance nature-positive tourism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding why people do what they do is central to advancing equitable and sustainable futures. Yet, theories about human action are fragmented across many social science disciplines, each with its own jargon and implicit assumptions. This fragmentation has hindered theory integration and accessibility of theories relevant to a given challenge. We synthesized human action theories from across the humanities and social sciences. We developed eight underlying assumptions—metatheories—that reveal a fundamental organization of human action theories. We describe each metatheory and the challenges that it best elucidates (illustrated with climate change examples). No single metatheory addresses the full range of factors and problems; only one treats interactions between factors. Our synthesis will help researchers, policymakers, and practitioners gain a multifaceted understanding of human action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rapid Arctic environmental change affects the entire Earth system as thawing permafrost ecosystems release greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Understanding how much permafrost carbon will be released, over what time frame, and what the relative emissions of carbon dioxide and methane will be is key for understanding the impact on global climate. In addition, the response of vegetation in a warming climate has the potential to offset at least some of the accelerating feedback to the climate from permafrost carbon. Temperature, organic carbon, and ground ice are key regulators for determining the impact of permafrost ecosystems on the global carbon cycle. Together, these encompass services of permafrost relevant to global society as well as to the people living in the region and help to determine the landscape-level response of this region to a changing climate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD++) policies, projects, and interventions are among the most prominent of recent attempts to mitigate climate change. Because REDD++ projects focus on forests, they simultaneously affect socioeconomic and ecological outcomes at local, subnational, national, regional, and global levels. This review assesses the promise of REDD++ for the continued ability of forests to provide multiple benefits to human societies at multiple scales. We survey REDD++ efforts at different levels, examining them through an actor-oriented approach. The article highlights the criticality of collaborative action to enhance desired outcomes of REDD++ efforts. In summarizing major REDD++ future trends, the paper emphasizes the need to learn from past forestry, agricultural, biodiversity, and development policies, and for adaptive policy making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aerosols are suspensions of solid and//or liquid particles in the atmosphere and modify atmospheric radiative fluxes and chemistry. Aerosols move mass from one part of the earth system to other parts of the earth system, thereby modifying biogeochemistry and the snow surface albedo. This paper reviews our understanding of the impacts of aerosols on climate through direct radiative changes, aerosol-cloud interactions (indirect effects), atmospheric chemistry, snow albedo, and land and ocean biogeochemistry. Aerosols play an important role in the preindustrial (natural) climate system and have been perturbed substantially over the anthropocene, often directly by human activity. The most important impacts of aerosols, in terms of climate forcing, are from the direct and indirect effects, with large uncertainties. Similarly large impacts of aerosols on land and ocean biogeochemistry have been estimated, but these have larger uncertainties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discounting plays a central role in decisions about global environmental change that affect the well-being of future generations. Discounting the future more heavily tilts decisions toward the present, making it less likely that society will undertake actions to mitigate climate change or other global environmental change. This article reviews the standard economics approach to discounting that emerges from solving for optimal savings and investment through time. Discounting depends on the pure rate of time preference and differences in consumption levels across time, giving rise to different marginal utilities of consumption. Discounting for problems like climate change that impact future generations involves an ethical dimension. This article includes discussions of ethical dimensions of discounting related to intragenerational and intergenerational equity and also covers behavioral economics, ecological economics, and mainstream economics approaches to discounting. The article closes with a review of the debates over discounting in climate change policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coastal settlements, home to more than three billion people and growing rapidly, are highly vulnerable to climate change. Increasingly, there are calls for climate adaptation that goes beyond business-as-usual approaches, transforms socioeconomic systems, and addresses underlying drivers of vulnerability. Although calls for transformational adaptation are growing, greater clarity is needed on what transformation means in context in order to bridge the gap between theory and practice. This article reviews the theoretical literature on transformational adaptation, as well as practitioner frameworks and case studies of urban coastal adaptation. The article discusses specific challenges for transformational adaptation and its governance in coastal cities. In doing so, this review contributes to the growing debate about operationalizing the concept of transformational adaptation in the context of coastal cities and offers insights to ensure that transformation processes are inclusive and equitable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, machine learning has proven to be a powerful tool for deriving insights from data. In this review, we describe ways in which machine learning has been leveraged to facilitate the development and operation of sustainable energy systems. We first provide a taxonomy of machine learning paradigms and techniques, along with a discussion of their strengths and limitations. We then provide an overview of existing research using machine learning for sustainable energy production, delivery, and storage. Finally, we identify gaps in this literature, propose future research directions, and discuss important considerations for deployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental factors, particularly those related to climate change, are stranding or could strand assets across different sectors and geographies with significant implications for economies, companies, financial institutions, communities, and workers. In this review, we focus on physical climate change, biodiversity loss, and litigation related to environmental factors as causes of stranded assets. We also review the emerging literature on the consequences of asset stranding for society before turning to some of the key supervisory responses that are emerging to ensure that stranded assets are measured and managed, particularly by financial institutions. These are among the areas of the stranded assets literature that have been growing most rapidly since 2015, and we focus on the literature produced since then. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The knowledge, values, and practices of Indigenous peoples and local communities offer ways to understand and better address social-environmental problems. The article reviews the state of the literature on this topic by focusing on six pathways by which Indigenous peoples and local communities engage with management of and relationships to nature. These are (a) undertaking territorial management practices and customary governance, (b) contributing to nature conservation and restoration efforts with regional to global implications, (c) co-constructing knowledge for assessments and monitoring, (d) countering the drivers of unsustainable resource use and resisting environmental injustices, (e) playing key roles in environmental governance across scales, and (f) offering alternative conceptualizations of the interrelations between people and nature. The review shows that through these pathways Indigenous peoples and local communities are making significant contributions to managing the health of local and regional ecosystems, to producing knowledge based in diverse values of nature, confronting societal pressures and environmental burdens, and leading and partnering in environmental governance. These contributions have local to global implications but have yet to be fully recognized in conservation and development polices, and by society at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite three decades of political efforts and a wealth of research on the causes and catastrophic impacts of climate change, global carbon dioxide emissions have continued to rise and are 60% higher today than they were in 1990. Exploring this rise through nine thematic lenses—covering issues of climate governance, the fossil fuel industry, geopolitics, economics, mitigation modeling, energy systems, inequity, lifestyles, and social imaginaries—draws out multifaceted reasons for our collective failure to bend the global emissions curve. However, a common thread that emerges across the reviewed literature is the central role of power, manifest in many forms, from a dogmatic political-economic hegemony and influential vested interests to narrow techno-economic mindsets and ideologies of control. Synthesizing the various impediments to mitigation reveals how delivering on the commitments enshrined in the Paris Agreement now requires an urgent and unprecedented transformation away from today's carbon- and energy-intensive development paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change decision-making has emerged in recent decades as an area of research and practice, expanding on an earlier focus on climate policy. Defined as the study of decisions relevant for climate change, it draws on developments in decision science, particularly advances in the study of cognitive and deliberative processes in individuals and organizations. The effects of climate, economic, social, and other framings on decision-making have been studied, often showing that nonclimate frames can be as effective as, or more effective than, climate frames in promoting decision-making and action. The concept of urgency, linked to the ideas of climate crisis and climate emergency, has taken on importance in recent years. Research on climate decision-making has influenced numerous areas of climate action, including nudges and other behavioral interventions, corporate social responsibility, and Indigenous decision-making. Areas of transformational change, such as strategic retreat in the face of sea-level rise, are emerging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities are particularly vulnerable to extreme weather episodes, which are expected to increase with climate change. Cities also influence their own local climate, for example, through the relative warming known as the urban heat island (UHI) effect. This review discusses urban climate features (even in complex terrain) and processes. We then present state-of-the-art methodologies on the generalization of a common urban neighborhood classification for UHI studies, as well as recent developments in observation systems and crowdsourcing approaches. We discuss new modeling paradigms pertinent to climate impact studies, with a focus on building energetics and urban vegetation. In combination with regional climate modeling, new methods benefit the variety of climate scenarios and models to provide pertinent information at urban scale. Finally, this article presents how recent research in urban climatology contributes to the global agenda on cities and climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite their heterogeneity, small island developing states (SIDS) are recognized as being particularly at risk to climate change, and, as they share numerous common traits, the United Nations recognizes them as a special group. SIDS have been quite vocal in calling attention to the challenges they face from climate change and advocating for greater international ambition to limit global warming. Here, we unpack factors that are helpful in understanding the relationship between climate change and SIDS through a review of studies that span disciplines and methodologies. We assess patterns of hazards, exposure, and vulnerability; impacts and risks; awareness and knowledge; adaptation planning and implementation; mitigation; loss and damage; and climate justice to provide an overarching review of literature on climate change and SIDS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digitalization has opened up a wealth of new goods and services with strong consumer appeal alongside potential emission-reduction benefits. Examples range from shared, on-demand electric mobility and peer-to-peer trading of electricity, food, and cars to grid-responsive smart appliances and heating systems. In this review, we identify an illustrative sample of 33 digital consumer innovations that challenge emission-intensive mainstream consumption practices in mobility, food, homes, and energy domains. Across these domains, digital innovations offer consumers a range of potentially appealing attributes from control, choice, and convenience to independence, interconnectedness, and integration with systems. We then compile quantitative estimates of change in activity, energy, or emissions as a result of consumers adopting digital innovations. This novel synthesis of the evidence base shows clear but variable potential emission-reduction benefits of digital consumer innovations. However, a small number of studies show emission increases from specific innovations as a result of induced demand or substitution effects that need careful management by public policy. We also consider how concurrent adoption of digital consumer innovations across mobility, food, homes, and energy domains can cause broader disruptive impacts on regulatory frameworks, norms, and infrastructures. We conclude by arguing for the importance of public policy in steering the digitalization of consumer goods and services toward low-carbon outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Celebrity advocacy for environmental causes has grown dramatically in recent decades. An examination of this expansion and the rise of causes such as climate change reveals the shifting politics and organization of advocacy. We address these changes to the construction and interpretation of celebrity advocacy and detail how they have produced a rich variety of environmental celebrity advocates. We also account for differences between legacy (e.g., radio, TV, newspapers) and online celebrities and their practices (e.g., hashtag publics, brandjacking, online communities). Environmental celebrity advocates' performances can be divided into nine tropes, each characterized in part by the particular varieties of environmentalism that they promote. We present the tropes and discuss their five cross-cutting themes. We conclude with a set of questions for future research on celebrity environmentalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After several years of REDD+ (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries, and the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests, and enhancement of forest carbon stocks in developing countries) readiness, countries are starting to move toward REDD+ implementation and accessing results-based payments (RBPs). Currently various parallel processes for accessing RBPs exist, including project and jurisdictional—approaches that often operate under a nascent national framework. This review is structured around the key considerations for countries to implement REDD+ and access RBPs. It offers a discussion focusing on three areas that are crucial for the success of REDD+: (a) REDD+ in the context of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), (b) the role of the private sector in achieving emissions reductions, and (c) access to RBPs for REDD+. We present some key considerations for future issues and possible successes of REDD+ implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Weather and climate extremes impose serious impacts on natural and human systems. In its fifth assessment report (AR5) and a special report [Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX)], the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change provided a thorough assessment of observed and projected changes in extremes in a warming climate, with evidenced scientific gaps in the understanding of these responsive changes being reported. Reviewing post-AR5 literature, this article synthesizes recent advances regarding these previous gaps with respect to detection, attribution, and projection of extremes. We focus on constraints for the assessment confidence, overlooked types and characteristics of extremes, and changes in their thermodynamic-dynamic drivers. We also stress potential misinterpretations of existing results, propose an update of earlier key findings, and identify burgeoning topics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through integrative assessment, experts evaluate the state of knowledge on complex problems relevant to societies. In this review, we take stock of recent advances and challenges, rooting our analysis in climate change assessment. In particular, we consider four priorities in assessment: ( a) integrating diverse evidence including quantitative and qualitative results and understanding, ( b) applying rigorous expert judgment to evidence and its uncertainties, ( c) exploring widely ranging futures and their connections to ongoing choices and actions, and ( d) incorporating interactions among experts and decision makers in assessment processes. Across these assessment priorities, we survey past experiences, current practices, and possibilities for future experimentation, innovation, and learning. In our current era of climate and broader global change, integrative assessment can bolster decisions about contested and uncertain futures. We consider both opportunities and pitfalls in synthesizing and encompassing evidence and perspectives. Our aim is to advance transparent assessment for a sustainable future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) conducts policy-relevant but not policy-prescriptive assessments of climate science. In this review, we engage with some of the key design features, achievements, and challenges that situate and characterize the IPCC as an intergovernmental organization that is tasked with producing global environmental assessments (GEAs). These include the process of working through consensus to assess and summarize climate science and the need to include knowledge from as many of the 195 IPCC nation-states as possible, despite the structural inequalities between developed and developing countries. To highlight salient features that are unique to the IPCC but that offer lessons for other organizations that conduct GEAs, we include case studies on the politics of climate denialism, the use of geoengineering in mitigation scenarios, and the links between adaptive capacity, adaptation, and global development. We conclude with a discussion of institutional reflexivity. We consider how the IPCC can model an ethical and participatory response to climate change by critically examining, and being transparent about, the relation between science and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Anthropocene, the concept that the Earth has moved into a novel geological epoch characterized by human domination of the planetary system, is an increasingly prevalent framework for debate both in academia and as a wider cultural and policy zeitgeist. This article reviews the proliferation of literature surrounding this concept. It explores the origins and history of the concept, as well as the arguments surrounding its geological formalization and starting date ranging from the Pleistocene to the twentieth century. It examines perspectives and critiques of the concept from the Earth system sciences, ecological and geological sciences, and social sciences and humanities, exploring its role as a cultural zeitgeist and ideological provocation. I conclude by offering a personal perspective on the concept of the Anthropocene and its utility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent changes in arctic vegetation might not be driven by climate change alone. Legacies of human activities have received little attention as a contributing factor. We examine the extent to which traditional human activities (hunting, herding, fire, wood extraction, and agriculture) have had lasting effects on arctic woody plant communities and therefore might continue to affect biome-wide responses to climate change. Evidence suggests that legacies are likely to be evident across meters to hundreds of kilometers and for decades, centuries, and millennia. The evidence, however, is currently sparse, and we highlight the potential to develop systematic assessments through a circumarctic collaboratory consisting of a network of interdisciplinary field sites, standardized protocols, participatory research, and new approaches. We suggest that human activities should be brought into consideration to increase our understanding of arctic vegetation dynamics in general and to assess woody plant responses to climate change in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soils represent a significant reservoir of biological diversity that underpins a broad range of key processes and moderate ecosystem service provision. Our understanding of the role that soil organisms play in ecosystems is still developing, but the increased investigation into biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationships in soils over the past couple of decades has provided insights that have greatly enhanced our ability to sustainably manage soil biodiversity. In this review, we synthesize emerging knowledge of soil biodiversity as a natural resource that supports the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems and their delivery of ecosystem services. We explore how environmental changes alter soil biodiversity and how this in turn can affect ecosystem processes as well as resistance and resilience to environmental changes. We then discuss ways to include soil biodiversity in management strategies for sustainable production and biodiversity conservation. We conclude by highlighting key research challenges to further improve our knowledge of soil biodiversity and its management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inclusive wealth is a measure designed to address whether society is on a sustainable development trajectory. Inclusive wealth is defined as the aggregate value of all capital assets. Increases in inclusive wealth indicate an improved productive base capable of supporting a higher standard of living in the future. To be truly inclusive, measures of inclusive wealth must include the value of all forms of capital that contribute to human well-being: human capital, manufactured capital, natural capital, and social capital. Sustainability concerns have increased attention on the ways of measuring the value of natural capital. We review various attempts to measure natural capital and to incorporate these into inclusive wealth including estimates using national wealth accounts and integrated ecological and economic models used to estimate ecosystem services. Empirically measuring the value of various types of capital in terms of a common metric is hugely challenging, and no current attempt to date can be said to be fully inclusive. Despite the empirical challenges, inclusive wealth provides a clear, coherent, and systematic framework for addressing sustainable development. Combining measures of semi-inclusive wealth that capture forms of capital that can be relatively easily measured in monetary terms with a set of biophysical metrics capturing important aspects of natural capital that are difficult to measure in monetary terms may provide a good set of signals of whether society is proceeding along a sustainable development trajectory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We outline the frameworks that shape and hold apart waste debates in and about the Global North and Global South and that hinder analysis of flows between them. Typically, waste is addressed as municipal waste, resulting in a focus on domestic consumption and urban governance and an emphasis on cities and the national scale. The prevailing ways of addressing the increasingly global flows of wastes between the North and South are those of global environmental justice and are underpinned by the geographical imagination encoded in the Basel Convention. New research on the trades in used goods and recycling in lower income countries challenges these accounts. It shows that arguments about dumping on the South need revision. Wastes are secondary resources for lower income countries, harvesting them is a significant economic activity, and consequent resource recovery is a key part of the global economy. Four areas for future research are identified: ( a) changing patterns of global harvesting, ( b) attempts to rescale resource recovery and the challenges faced, ( c) the geopolitics of resource recovery, and ( d) changes in resource recovery in lower income countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Approximately 40% of the global population relies on traditional bioenergy, accounting for 9% of global energy use and 55% of global wood harvest. However, knowledge about the environmental impacts of traditional bioenergy is fragmented. This review addresses several persistent questions and summarizes recent research on land cover change (LCC) and pollution emissions resulting from traditional bioenergy use. We also review recent studies analyzing transitions from traditional bioenergy to cleaner stoves and fuels. Between 27 and 34% of the wood fuel harvest in 2009 was unsustainable, with large geographical variations. Almost 300 million rural people live in wood fuel 'hotspots,' concentrated in South Asia and East Africa, creating risks of wood-fuel-driven degradation. Different fuels and stoves show variation in climate-forcing emissions. Many, but not all, nontraditional stoves result in lower emissions than traditional models. Traditional bioenergy makes substantial contributions to anthropogenic black carbon (BC) emissions (18-30%) and small contributions to total anthropogenic climate impacts (2-8%). Transitions from traditional fuels and devices have proven difficult. Stacking, i.e., the use of multiple devices and fuels to satisfy household energy needs, is common, showing the need to shift stove interventions from the common approach that promotes one fuel and one device to integrated approaches that incorporate deep understanding of local needs and practices, and multiple fuels and devices, while monitoring residual use of traditional technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We review the challenges and future perspectives of regional climate model (RCM), or dynamical downscaling, activities. Among the main technical issues in need of better understanding are those of selection and sensitivity to the model domain and resolution, techniques for providing lateral boundary conditions, and RCM internal variability. The added value (AV) obtained with the use of RCMs remains a central issue, which needs more rigorous and comprehensive analysis strategies. Within the context of regional climate projections, large ensembles of simulations are needed to better understand the models and characterize uncertainties. This has provided an impetus for the development of the Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX), the first international program offering a common protocol for downscaling experiments, and we discuss how CORDEX can address the key scientific challenges in downscaling research. Among the main future developments in RCM research, we highlight the development of coupled regional Earth system models and the transition to very high-resolution, cloud-resolving models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The livestock and environment nexus has been the subject of considerable research in the past decade. With a more prosperous and urbanized population projected to grow significantly in the coming decades comes a gargantuan appetite for livestock products. There is growing concern about how to accommodate this increase in demand with a low environmental footprint and without eroding the economic, social, and cultural benefits that livestock provide. Most of the effort has focused on sustainably intensifying livestock systems. Two things have characterized the research on livestock and the environment in the past decade: the development of increasingly disaggregated and sophisticated methods for assessing different types of environmental impacts (climate, water, nutrient cycles, biodiversity, land degradation, deforestation, etc.) and a focus on examining the technical potential of many options for reducing the environmental footprint of livestock systems. However, the economic or sociocultural feasibility of these options is seldom considered. Now is the time to move this agenda from knowledge to action, toward realizable goals. This will require a better understanding of incentives and constraints for farmers to adopt new practices and the design of novel policies to support transformative changes in the livestock sector. It will also require novel forms of engagement, interaction, and consensus building among stakeholders with enormously diverse objectives. Additionally, we have come to realize that managing the demand trajectories of livestock products must be part of the solution space, and this is an increasingly important research area for simultaneously achieving positive health and environmental outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union (EU) is influential in environmental politics and policy-making across its 28 member states, around its periphery, and globally. Building on a diverse analytical and empirical literature, this article's seven sections each highlights important research findings and outcomes from more than four decades of EU environmental governance. These include ( a) a substantial transfer of legal authority from member states to the supranational level; ( b) a growing involvement of EU bodies, advocacy groups, and civil society in regional goal-setting and decision-making; ( c) the development of elaborate governance systems and mechanisms for making, implementing, and enforcing policy; ( d) EU exercise of considerable influence over countries seeking membership before and after joining the Union; ( e) increased EU participation and influence in international fora; ( f) a mixed record of uneven implementation and varied environmental outcomes in Europe and across the world; and ( g) continuing challenges in nascent attempts to engender greater resource efficiency and sustainability in Europe and beyond. All of these findings and outcomes suggest numerous areas and directions for additional research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To satisfy a growing population, much of Earth's surface has been designed to suit humanity's needs. Although these ecosystem designs have improved human welfare, they have also produced significant negative environmental impacts, which applied ecology as a field has attempted to address and solve. Many of the failures in applied ecology to achieve this goal of reducing negative environmental impacts are design failures, not failures in the science. Here, we review ( a) how humans have designed much of Earth's surface, ( b) the history of design ideas in ecology and the philosophical and practical critiques of these ideas, ( c) design as a conceptual process, ( d) how changing approaches and goals in subfields of applied ecology reflect changes and failures in design, and ( e) why it is important not only for ecologists to encourage design fields to incorporate ecology into their practice but also for design to be more thoroughly incorporated into ours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Well into the 21st century, safe and affordable drinking water remains an unmet human need. At least 1.8 billion people are potentially exposed to microbial contamination, and close to 140 million people are potentially exposed to unsafe levels of arsenic. Many new technologies, water quality assessments, health impact assessments, cost studies, and user preference studies have emerged in the past 20 years to further the laudable goal of safe drinking water for all. This article reviews ( a) the current literature on safe water approaches with respect to their effectiveness in improving water quality and protectiveness in improving human health, ( b) new work on the uptake and use of safe water systems among low-income consumers, ( c) new research on the cash and labor costs of safe water systems, and ( d) research on user preferences and valuations for safe water. Our main recommendation is that safe water from 'source to sip' should be seen as a system; this entire system, rather than a discrete intervention, should be the object of analysis for technical, economic, and health assessments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International policies for mitigation of climate change provide a global public good and thus suffer from 'free riding,' i.e., inaction of governments. In 25 years of negotiations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the regime has changed its character from a top-down approach based on mandatory emissions commitments to a bottom-up system of voluntary government pledges. At the same time, various initiatives by governments at all levels and private companies have been established, but most are limited to emissions reporting and exchange of knowledge on mitigation technologies. None of the alternatives has shown a higher mitigation effectiveness than the Kyoto Protocol. Generally, the transition toward a bottom-up regime risks a reduction of transparency and increases in the transaction costs of mitigation. Although it could give rise to a club of countries engaging in strong mitigation that could expand over time, it is unlikely to be ambitious enough to achieve the target of limiting warming to 2°C. On the one hand, carbon prices will be applied in a larger number of jurisdictions, and mitigation technologies diffuse around the world. On the other hand, carbon price levels will remain relatively low, and their mitigation benefits will be more than outweighed by the growth of infrastructure and consumption. Thus, a temperature increase of at least 3°C by 2100 becomes more and more likely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consumption, although often considered an individual choice, is deeply ingrained in behaviors, cultures, and institutions, and is driven and supported by corporate and government practices. Consumption is also at the heart of many of our most critical ecological, health, and social problems. What is referred to broadly as sustainable consumption has primarily focused on making consumption more efficient and gradually decoupling it from energy and resource use. We argue for the need to focus sustainable consumption initiatives on the key impact areas of consumption-transport, housing, energy use, and food-and at deeper levels of system change. To meet the scale of the sustainability challenges we face, interventions and policies must move from relative decoupling via technological improvements, to strategies to change the behavior of individual consumers, to broader initiatives to change systems of production and consumption. We seek to connect these emerging literatures on behavior change, structural interventions, and sustainability transitions to arrive at integrated frameworks for learning, iteration, and scaling of sustainability innovations. We sketch the outlines of research and practice that offer potentials for system changes for truly sustainable consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental ethics-the study of ethical questions raised by human relations with the nonhuman environment-emerged as an important subfield of philosophy during the 1970s. It is now a flourishing area of research. This article provides a review of the secular, Western traditions in the field. It examines both anthropocentric and nonanthropocentric claims about what has value, as well as divergent views about whether environmental ethics should be concerned with bringing about best consequences, respecting principles and rights, or embodying environmental virtues. The article also briefly considers two critical traditions-ecofeminism and environmental pragmatism-and explores some of the difficult environmental ethics questions posed by anthropogenic climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia is a mineral-rich country with low and variable rainfall and, hence, biological productivity, as well as a predominately coastal population. Since European settlement in 1788, a range of landscape impacts, species introductions, and freshwater conflicts have led to serious environmental issues. Contemporary drivers of environmental change include population growth and associated development; water use for food production; resource extraction by the fishery, forestry, mining, and oil and gas industries; and climate change. A range of international agreements have influenced domestic environmental policy, culminating in Australia's foremost piece of environmental legislation, the Commonwealth Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999. Despite sound legislative instruments and policy intentions, a range of contemporary environmental issues associated with coal seam gas extraction, freshwater allocation, fisheries, and climate change illustrate that shortcomings in resolving environmental issues and obstacles remain with regard to improving the status of the environment. Given the increasing pressures on the environment, greater oversight and efficient enforcement are needed, particularly given population projections and plans for economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Anthropocene is characterized as an epoch when human influence has begun to fundamentally alter many aspects of the Earth system and many of the planet's biomes. Here, we review and synthesize our understanding of Anthropocene changes in tropical forests. Key facets include deforestation driven by agricultural expansion, timber and wood extraction, the loss of fauna that maintain critical ecological connections, the spread of fire, landscape fragmentation, the spread of second-growth forests, new species invasion and pathogen spread, increasing CO2, and climate change. The patterns of change are spatially heterogeneous, are often characterized by strong interactions among different drivers, can have both large-scale and remote effects, and can play out through ecological cascades over long timescales. As a consequence, most tropical forests are on a trajectory to becoming altered ecosystems, with the degree of alteration dependent on the intensity and duration of the current bottleneck of human-induced pressures. We highlight the importance of this understanding to develop the strategies necessary for shaping the transition of tropical forests through the early Anthropocene, as well as highlight the opportunities and challenges for the tropical forest science community in the coming decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines renewable energy (RE) technologies in a multiple-objective framework of sustainable development. We begin by locating RE in a portfolio of options available for climate change mitigation. Observing current trends in technologies, deployment levels, and costs, we discuss the future deployment levels envisioned in mitigation scenarios. We focus on biomass, given its importance in climate mitigation scenarios and because of the ongoing debates about its role in sustainability objectives. We also examine trends and successes in RE support policies. We conclude by linking the multiple objectives of sustainability to multiple policy instruments, emphasizing the need to closely consider the interaction between different policy instruments incentivizing sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans have had an impact on regional and global environments even prior to the Industrial Revolution through anthropogenic fire, agriculture, and the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna. The preindustrial impact of anthropogenic fire to modify ecosystems and affect climate may have been small because in regions where impacts were once thought to be large, such as in Australia, the evidence now suggests a smaller effect. Both the extinction of the megafauna, which evidence indicates to be at least partially caused by humans, and preindustrial agriculture may have affected climate, but the effects may have offset each other. For instance, climate simulations indicate that megafauna extinctions may have led to a slight global warming, but later, agriculture led to a slight global cooling. Prior to the industrial era, the largest ecological and climate anomaly may have been associated with forest expansion during the early and mid-Holocene when there were few megafauna and agriculturalists to reduce this expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fire is an ancient influence on the Earth system, affecting biogeochemical cycles and ecosystems. Humans have had a profound influence on global fire activity through setting and controlling fires, modifying the flammability of landscapes, and, more recently, changing the climate through the combustion of fossil fuels. We review this web of complex direct and indirect effects of fire on Earth using the framework provided by the emerging discipline of pyrogeography that unites biological, atmospheric, and social perspectives on fire. We describe the transition from fire activity before humans evolved, through the hunter-gatherer and agricultural phases, to the current period in Earth history dominated by industrialization (Anthropocene). We illustrate how pyrogeography provides the necessary framework to understand fire in the Anthropocene, including the management of pyrogenic emissions, protection of human life, conservation of biodiversity, and provision of ecosystem services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]