Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Sustainability
Governing transboundary river barriers: adaptive management challenges in South and Southeast Asia
Published: 2025-08-30
Subjects: Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology, Sustainability, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Water Resource Management
Methodological Concerns Regarding RSPO Certification and Plantation Efficiency in Malaysia. A commentary on "Sustainable Palm Oil Certification Inadvertently Affects Production Efficiency in Malaysia" by Zachlod et al. (2025).
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Studies, Sustainability
This commentary is in response to the recent article by Zachlod et al. (2025), Sustainable palm oil certification inadvertently affects production efficiency in Malaysia published in Communications Earth & Environment, 6(1), 200. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-02150-2. It concludes that Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) certification leads to reduced plantation efficiency in [...]
The Grand Challenges of WPI-AIMEC: Executive Summary
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Climate, Databases and Information Systems, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Marine Biology, Nature and Society Relations, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Planetary Biogeochemistry, Remote Sensing, Sustainability
The ocean has a heat capacity 1,000 times greater than that of the atmosphere and stores 50 times more carbon comparatively, thus, constituting a major sink of anthropogenically released greenhouse gases. Warming effects of human activities on the climate system are now undeniably shown to impact marine life and ecosystems, both directly via warming of the ocean and/or indirectly altering ocean [...]
Low-cost autonomous chambers enable high spatial and temporal resolution monitoring of soil CO₂ exchange across landscapes
Published: 2025-08-15
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Biogeochemistry, Climate, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Meteorology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Soil Science, Sustainability, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Soil CO₂ flux is a critical component of ecosystem carbon cycling, but due to high cost and mechanistic constraints, existing measurement systems are often limited by trade-offs between resolution (temporal and spatial), and spatial coverage. These constraints hinder efforts to monitor soil fluxes across diverse, heterogeneous landscapes and environmental gradients. 2. We developed Fluxbot [...]
Only half of the calories produced on croplands are available for human consumption
Published: 2025-07-24
Subjects: Agriculture, Sustainability
Managing limited agricultural land to feed a growing population with changing diets requires understanding and managing tradeoffs associated with how crops are utilized. Here, we quantify the impact of how 50 crops are used for food, livestock feed, biofuels, and other non-food uses on available calories from 2010 to 2020. We find that, although total calorie production increased by 23.9% from [...]
Screening Global Solar and Wind Energy Investment Potential Accounting for Drought and Surplus
Published: 2025-07-14
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Risk Analysis, Sustainability
Climate-induced variability of solar and wind energy impacts renewable electricity scaling. Long duration renewable energy droughts, i.e., extended periods of renewable supply deficits, lead to contract penalties or use of thermo-electric sources, while long duration surpluses result in curtailment or in low energy prices and revenue. We present the first global assessment of the implied [...]
Conservation is Coherence: Introducing the Negawatt Philosophy of Lawful Design
Published: 2025-07-10
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Natural Resources and Conservation, Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Physics, Other Planetary Sciences, Sustainability, Systems Biology
This paper articulates the Negawatt Philosophy, reframing conservation not as omission or moral restraint, but as the structural intelligence that sustains life and preserves biospheric coherence. Modern economies valorise extraction and combustion while treating conservation as invisible absence. Yet thermodynamics reveals life as negentropy—an ordering that defies the drift into entropy’s [...]
Food security beyond borders: how crop imports affect drought risk of conflict-affected countries
Published: 2025-06-25
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Climate, Environmental Studies, Hydrology, Meteorology, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Sustainability
Drought events can disrupt food security and increase the risk of violent conflicts. In an interconnected global food system, countries rely on both local food production and imports to meet domestic demand. When assessing the impact of drought risk on national food security, however, imported crops are often overlooked. This study incorporates international crop trade information to understand [...]
Land Use, Sustainability, and Democratic Backsliding
Published: 2025-06-19
Subjects: Geography, Sustainability
Land use and land systems, i.e. how human societies manage and interact with land through social-ecological systems, are at the core of sustainability issues. Democratic backsliding, i.e. the decline or degradation of the institutions and social norms that sustain democratic societies, is a widespread and impactful trend, with strong but understudied two-ways linkages with land use dynamics. From [...]
Lagged impacts of groundwater pumping on streamflow due to stream drying: Incorporation into analytical streamflow depletion estimation methods
Published: 2025-06-18
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Water management often requires accounting for reductions in streamflow caused by groundwater pumping (‘streamflow depletion’). Since streamflow depletion cannot be quantified from observational data, it is typically modeled. Analytical depletion functions (ADFs) are a low-cost, low-complexity approach for estimating streamflow depletion with utility for decision support, but ADFs adopt several [...]
Effects of IBGE's 2019 Biomes Definition on Different Political-Administrative Scales in Brazil
Published: 2025-06-13
Subjects: Sustainability
In 2019, the official delimitation of the Brazilian biomes was updated to a considerably more detailed description compared to the previous definition that lasted 15 years. This work investigates the possible effects of such changes in different political-administrative scales, ranging from biomes to the municipality level. We define effect levels according to the changes between the biomes in [...]
Agri-food corporations’ role in water sustainability and water resilience of global supply chains
Published: 2025-05-23
Subjects: Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Agriculture is both a major contributor to water scarcity and highly vulnerable to it. The agri-food sector accounts for approximately 70% of global human water abstraction and 90% of water consumption, with irrigation practices leading to detrimental effects such as reduced streamflow, groundwater depletion, and environmental degradation. As water stress impacts crop and livestock productivity, [...]
Time shift: The peak reduction potential of demand response with simple time-of-use pricing
Published: 2025-05-15
Subjects: Engineering, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Sustainability
Increasing electrification of energy systems, required for greenhouse gas emissions reductions, poses challenges for electricity systems from increased peak demand. Demand response can reduce peak demand, but acceptability is limited by consumer concerns about effort, complexity, and lack of control. This study assesses the potential of simple demand response programs using existing electricity [...]
Peak loads, health, and energy equality: The effects of demand-side electricity efficiency interventions
Published: 2025-05-15
Subjects: Engineering, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Sustainability
Electrification is key for climate change mitigation but, if unmanaged, risks increasing energy poverty, inequalities, and peak electricity demand. While demand response to reduce peak electricity demand has been the subject of extensive research, the effects of energy efficiency interventions for wider health system and socioeconomic outcomes are less studied. This study assesses the impact of [...]
Peak demand, consumer costs, and socioeconomic effects: Considerations for distributed generation and energy storage
Published: 2025-05-15
Subjects: Engineering, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Sustainability
Electrification is a key approach for reducing greenhouse gas emissions but will increase peak demand, challenging electricity systems. Distributed generation (DG) from solar photovoltaic (PV) panels and battery storage are often offered as potential solutions. This study uses a previously validated agent-based model of residential electricity demand to assess the impact of solar DG on peak [...]