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Coastal river deltas around the world are at risk of relative sea-level rise driven by global sea-level rise, human-induced compaction, and natural subsidence. Deltas naturally accumulate sediment when the accommodation space for aggradation is made available through relative sea-level rise, but this process is often prevented by human activities prohibiting flooding and therefore sediment deposition on delta land. Without sedimentation, deltas lose elevation relative to sea level, causing salinization and land loss. Sedimentation enhancing strategies aim to reduce or prevent these issues and improve delta sustainability by encouraging the natural delta-building process of sediment deposition, thereby combating relative sea-level rise by building new elevation.The implementation of sedimentation enhancing strategies presents both challenges and opportunities for delta system management from biophysical and societal perspectives. We explore the barriers to and enablers of sedimentation enhancing strategies from a transdisciplinary perspective to identify conditions for success. Key biophysical issues include rapid rates of relative sea-level rise, reduced fluvial sediment delivery, and lack of detailed knowledge about spatially and temporally variable sediment deposition, erosion, and coastal sediment delivery. From a societal perspective, conditions for successful sedimentation enhancing strategy implementation include social acceptance and local inclusion in decisions surrounding land use management, available finance including loss compensation, and institutional capacity, coordination, integration, and fit to the biophysical systems involved.We suggest that, while sedimentation enhancing strategies can be successfully employed at small scales to promote the achievement of sub-delta management goals, they can also be used as a springboard to transform delta management and environments to support long-term sustainability. This transformation requires re-integrating societal and biophysical systems rather than attempting to isolate and exclude them from each another. Delta-scale solutions will require imagination, engineering, and collaborative experimentation and learning to enhance resilience and reduce vulnerability in the face of environmental changes.

Loss and damage is the “third pillar” of international climate governance alongside mitigation and adaptation. When mitigation and adaptation fail, losses and damages occur. Scholars have been reacting to international political discourse centred around governing actual or potential severe losses and damages from climate change. Large gaps exist in relation to understanding the underlying power dimensions, rationalities, knowledges, and technologies of loss and damage governance and science. We draw from a Foucauldian-inspired governmentality framework to argue there is an emerging governmentality of loss and damage. We find, among other things, that root causes of loss and damage are being obscured, Western knowledge and technocratic interventions are centred, and there are colonial presupposed subjectivities of Global South victims of climate change, which are being contested by people bearing the brunt of the climate crisis. We propose future directions for critical research on climate change loss and damage.

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is the largest budget item in the European Union, but Member States report spending in a variety of formats and languages, hampering holistic analysis. Here we have made the payment data centered around the year 2015 spatially-explicit at the county or province (NUTS3) level, and aligned payment measures reported between Member States, by translating, harmonizing, and geolocating 16,443,532 million payments originally reported by EU Member States and compiled by the Open Data Foundation Germany through its project Farmsubsidy.org. We have assembled the first database to our knowledge to report individual farm-level CAP payments by standardized CAP funding measures and geolocation. This dataset allows in-depth analysis of over €60 billion in public spending from 2015 by purpose and location for the first time. Further, this data is representative of the distribution of annual payments dictated by the CAP program for 2014 to 2020. These data are of interest to researchers, policymakers, NGOs, and journalists alike for evaluating the distribution and impacts of CAP spending.

Global development for at least the next decade is to be guided by the internationally-agreed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations, which aim to improve societal well-being while limiting the impact of development on the environment and climate. Research on the SDGs is booming and awareness is increasing of how socio-economic context will affect local implementation and global achievement of the goals. Yet, the implications of context for the SDGs still receive only a small fraction of SDG research attention, and research explicitly on feedbacks affecting the SDGs in specific environmental contexts is rare.Using 49 coastal river deltas as a case study, we show that the environmental context of places will affect implementation and achievement of the SDGs. We quantitatively compare pathways to the SDGs between deltas and non-delta areas using three plausible future development scenarios until 2100. The scenarios represent three Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs): SSP1--sustainable development with low challenges for climate change mitigation and adaptation; SSP2--a 'middle of the road' scenario with intermediate challenges; and SSP3--a future with high mitigation and adaptation challenges due to rapid population growth, slow technological change, high inequalities, and weak institutions. We use the Integrated Assessment Model IMAGE to project global gridded outputs related to key SDGs in deltas for each scenario.Our analysis reiterates the importance of deltas for achieving the SDGs. Population densities in deltas globally could rise as much as ten times that of non-delta areas under the worst case scenario (SSP3). This would place immense pressure on implementing and achieving most SDGs in these places. Similarly, urbanisation of deltas is expected to increase more rapidly than non-deltas, creating challenges for sustainable cities (SDG 11). Many deltas are also saturated with cropland, the demand for which is expected to continue under all scenarios, with implications for achieving zero hunger (SDG 2) in these places and globally, as well as for delta biodiversity (SDG 15). Moreover, urban expansion and intensified agriculture may result in major groundwater extraction, which has dramatic effects on delta subsidence and therefore sustainability in the longer term.We describe how environmental processes and feedbacks pose serious risk to achieving sustainability goals in deltas, in particular due to their potentially profound delta impacts beyond the SDG time horizon of 2030. These environmental processes are often not captured in socio-economic or integrated assessment modelling, nor in much SDG research to date, which potentially limits large-scale SDG research, planning, and assessment. We argue that the importance of environmental context for achieving the SDGs extends beyond deltas into other environments (e.g., mountains, semi-arid regions). We conclude that greater attention to the biophysical and geomorphological setting of places should be paid in research, planning, and governance for the SDGs.

Loss and Damage from climate change, recognized as a unique research and policy domain through the Warsaw International Mechanism (WIM) in 2013, has drawn increasing attention among climate scientists and policy makers. As the “third pillar” of the international climate regime—along with mitigation and adaptation—some have suggested that Loss and Damage has the potential to catalyze important synergies with other international agendas, particularly sustainable development. However, the specific approaches to sustainable development that inform Loss and Damage research and how these approaches influence research outcomes and policy recommendations, remains largely unexplored. We offer the first systematic analysis of the assumptions of sustainable development that underpin Loss and Damage scholarship through a comprehensive review of peer-reviewed research on Loss and Damage. We demonstrate that the use of specific metrics, decision criteria and policy prescriptions by Loss and Damage researchers and practitioners imply an unwitting adherence to different underlying theories of sustainable development, which in turn impact how Loss & Damage is conceptualized and applied. In addition to research and policy implications, overarching conclusions of the review include: 1) that assumptions about the aims of sustainable development determine how one conceptualizes, measures and governs Loss and Damage and; 2) that the Human Development approach represents the most advanced perspective on sustainable development, and thus Loss and Damage, currently available. This review supports sustainable development as a truly coherent, comprehensive and integrative framework for Loss and Damage.