Compound heatwave-ozone pollution events are becoming more frequent under global warming, posing greater health risks than single heatwave events. This study projects that excess deaths from compound events will increase 53.7-fold by the 2090s under SSP3-7.0 relative to baseline. Combined adaptation strategies explicitly targeting compound events could generate 48.46 billion US dollars (321.85 billion yuan) in annual health economic benefits, substantially exceeding the gains achievable through single-heatwave adaptation strategies, with Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and the Central Plains Urban Agglomeration identified as priority regions for implementation.

Decarbonizing China’s iron and steel sector is essential for climate mitigation and could also deliver substantial PM2.5-related health co-benefits. Yet the magnitude and timing of these benefits remain unclear. Using an integrated framework that combines integrated assessment modeling, plant-level emissions inventories, and atmospheric chemistry simulations, we estimate that low-carbon transitions could reduce cumulative PM2.5 premature deaths by 37% during 2020–2060, with benefits mainly occurring after 2035. Ultra-low-emission retrofits can deliver an additional 34% reduction in the nearer term, while targeted plant retirement adds a further 6%.

Environmental and ecological researchers routinely use Indigenous data in models that inform decision-making, often without Indigenous governance or expertise. This perspective examines practical strategies for embedding CARE (collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, ethics) Principles in modeling to uphold Indigenous rights, strengthen scientific rigor, and improve model accuracy.

Setting aside more land for conservation can shift farming and land clearing elsewhere. Where these changes occur depends strongly on how conservation areas are chosen, with different approaches producing different outcomes across regions. Effective conservation therefore calls for considering not only how much land is protected, but what happens beyond it.

The Planetary Boundaries framework underpins sustainability governance, yet seven of nine boundaries are transgressed and assessments remain too coarse and infrequent to guide action. A planetary boundary intelligence system leveraging Earth observation and geospatial AI could deliver validated, uncertainty-aware indicators of Earth system dynamics if built on defined needs and sustained infrastructure.

Soil health is essential for sustainable agriculture, especially in drylands, which support over one‑third of the global population. The authors surveyed 265 dryland farmlands and developed an ecosystem‑services‑based framework, showing that biological indicators, particularly microorganisms, explain most variation in soil health, highlighting soil microbes as a key target for sustaining arid agriculture.

Scope 3 emissions dominate corporate carbon footprints, yet reported figures are often too uncertain to guide effective decarbonization, and this creates a dangerous illusion of climate accountability. This problem is intensifying as AI tools speed up flawed estimates. We propose three bedrock principles—credible, scalable, and actionable—to make Scope 3 accounting trustworthy and, critically, accelerate decarbonization.

Decentralized organic wastewater is costly and risky to collect, transport, and treat off-site, creating demand for compact on-site oxidation. Fenton chemistry can degrade many pollutants, yet it often wastes oxidants because hydroxyl radicals are rapidly quenched, and strategies to stabilize them for sustained use remain unclear. Here, we confine Fe–O4 single atoms within zeolite micropores to extend the effective liftetime of hydroxyl radical and sustain it generation for efficient, lower-cost wastewater purification.

Challenges exist in the UK’s supply of critical battery minerals that would impact the success of vehicle electrification and transport decarbonization policies. Synthetic e-fuels could provide an alternative solution, though the environmental, resource, and cost trade-offs remain unclear. Here, we present a life cycle assessment model demonstrating that e-fuels could be effective in decarbonizing transport fuels, although their implementation increases pressure on renewable energy generation and production costs, which must be carefully considered in the policy development.

Urban greening is widely promoted as a strategy to improve health, yet its cumulative global impact remains unknown. Using satellite observations and health data, this study finds that urban greening over the past decades has delivered substantial global health benefits but mainly in high- and upper-middle-income countries. These findings reveal inequities in the health impacts of urban greening worldwide.

Sustainable procurement of biomass is supported by the derivation of environmental impacts based on rapid and non-destructive spectral information, thereby bypassing error-prone administration. Combining geographical origin information derived from spectral characteristics of biomass feedstocks with impact assessment allows optimization between impact reduction and profitability while maintaining product quality. The approach can support sustainable procurement of any bio-based product.

As marine heat waves intensify, coral reef adaptation may struggle to keep pace. This perspective presents an operational framework that integrates heat-wave exposure and larval dispersal patterns to identify reef functional roles and management needs, helping guide evolution-informed interventions that support coral reef persistence under climate change.

Groundwater stress threatens sustainable development in China, yet the effectiveness of future adaptation strategies remains unclear. This study reveals that existing measures have limited effects on future intensifying groundwater stress, and the synergistic implementation of stringent water withdrawal management and supply enhancement is essential to substantially alleviate future stress.

A small number of corporations exert outsized influence over global production systems and biodiversity outcomes. Hawkins et al. find that although most of these keystone corporations report biodiversity commitments, only a small minority disclose sufficiently clear and measurable targets to enable third parties to evaluate whether they have been met, highlighting priorities for improving corporate action for nature.

Using satellite data across the United States, Yang et al. show that crop yields increase near field edges in humid regions but decline in dry regions. These findings highlight how climate and landscape context shape edge effects, offering new opportunities to optimize agricultural productivity through boundary management.

Summer-focused assessments may underestimate the impacts of ocean heat on marine ecosystems. Examining 201 events from 2023 to 2024, an exceptional period of ocean warmth, we show that one-third of non-tropical impacts and compound extreme events occurred outside warm seasons. These results emphasize the need for year-round impact assessments to inform preparedness plans.

Coral reefs depend on an unseen web of viruses, microbes, and tiny invertebrates that recycle nutrients, support food webs, and clean seawater. Despite their important role, most reef restoration efforts focus solely on corals. Little et al. show that these invisible communities can be transplanted as a unit by relocating pre-colonized settlement panels from natural reefs onto artificial reef structures to jump-start viral, microbial, and functional processes necessary to form a self-sustaining reef. The study offers a scalable, low-tech complement to coral planting and a new template for ecosystem-based reef restoration.

We find that the same reforestation has distinct impacts on water availability under different background climates, not only in the mean amount but also in spatial and seasonal distributions. This highlights that the hydrological outcomes of reforestation are pathway-dependent—a key insight for policymakers.

Bioenergy crops are often expected to support climate mitigation, but their expansion can conflict with food security, carbon storage, and biodiversity. This study maps where dedicated energy crops could expand under joint food and environmental safeguards, showing that sustainable potential is lower than many previous estimates and concentrated in a limited set of low-opportunity-cost regions.

This perspective explores emerging biodiversity frameworks and nature-based funding instruments (especially biodiversity credits) to catalyze investments needed to increase the scale, nature, and effectiveness of coral reef conservation. High-integrity coral reef biodiversity credits require the development of a robust biodiversity accounting framework that reflects positive and meaningful biodiversity outcomes and ecosystem benefits. This perspective outlines next steps and ongoing research and innovation needed to establish high-integrity coral reef biodiversity credits.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a critical One Health challenge requiring context-specific understanding and tailored interventions. We develop a single transmission mathematical model to compare hypothetical intervention packages targeting the priority pathogen third-generation cephalosporin-resistant E. coli across England, Denmark, and Senegal. The results suggest that reducing transmission between sectors and environmental AMR may be optimal. However, large uncertainties and limited comparable data highlight the urgent need for improved AMR surveillance across settings.

Microbes influence food long before and after it reaches the plate. This perspective introduces the food-microbe nexus, a framework linking microbes and food biochemicals across soils, crops, foods, and the human gut. It identifies research priorities for using microbiomes to improve crop nutrition, reduce postharvest losses, and support plant-based food innovation while outlining how emerging evidence can guide more nutritious and sustainable food-system transitions.

This study reveals the significant contribution of oceanic heatwaves to continental heatwaves, quantifies the attribution of anthropogenic climate change to landfalling oceanic heatwaves, and projects future changes under various global warming scenarios. The findings will significantly advance the understanding of the complex dynamics between oceanic and continental heatwaves and underscore the urgency of climate action.

Shifting cultivation has long been blamed for deforestation, but this paper shows that flawed remote sensing methods and misinterpreted data have exaggerated its role. By distinguishing forests, fallows, and active fields, the authors propose a framework for more accurate mapping, which can lead to more just land-use policies.

Rewilding is increasingly promoted as a solution to biodiversity loss and climate change, yet integrated planning frameworks remain limited. This study presents a novel climate-smart rewilding framework linking biodiversity recovery, climate mitigation and adaptation, and socio-economic outcomes to guide large-scale restoration decisions.

Plastic pollution is a pervasive environmental crisis, yet global mitigation is often hindered by a lack of item-specific data across diverse regions. This study analyses over 5,300 shoreline litter surveys across 112 nations to provide the first granular global index of macroplastic pollution by usage type. By identifying food and beverage plastics as a dominant pollutant in 93% of nations, this research shifts the focus toward targeted, sectoral interventions and upstream production reduction strategies.

The Strait of Hormuz closure intensifies natural-gas-related energy risks for Europe, triggering a new set of energy trilemmas. By contemplating several scenarios, we argue that natural-gas supplier diversification after the 2022 energy crisis is unlikely to resolve underlying energy-system vulnerability, whereas structural shifts toward renewables is crucial.

Global ecosystem respiration decreased over the past 30 years, as water limitation progressively outweighed the stimulatory effects of warming. This shift highlights the increasingly dominant role of water availability in regulating terrestrial carbon release, with important implications for predicting ecosystem responses to a warming and drying climate.

Global functional diversity (FD) of terrestrial vertebrates is facing severe erosion risk, with disproportionately high risk occurring outside FD hotspots. However, existing protected areas are limited in mitigating FD erosion. By integrating FD erosion into conservation planning, this study identifies priority areas for terrestrial vertebrate conservation, supporting the 30 × 30 target.

Recent increases in terrestrial carbon uptake are often assumed to reflect thermal acclimation. Using global eddy-covariance and satellite observations, Xu et al. show that maximum ecosystem photosynthesis increased without a global rise in optimum temperature. Instead, stomatal regulation and canopy development played larger roles, especially under dryness, suggesting that future land carbon projections must go beyond thermal acclimation alone.

Most of China’s retired EV batteries are still handled by the informal sector, posing environmental and safety risks. To examine how policy can change this trajectory, which remains elusive, we develop an integrated game-theoretic and system-dynamics model to simulate stakeholder responses. We show that a coordinated EPR strategy, which combines rigorous early regulation, targeted incentives, and stronger market dynamics, could divert over 90% of retired batteries into formal channels by 2060 while reducing ecological damage by 44%–73% relative to current trends.

Microbes colonizing plastic debris form the “plastisphere.” While this niche is a recognized hotspot for ARGs and potential pathogens, a comprehensive knowledge of ARG dissemination remains lacking. Our study shows that plastisphere-derived extracellular vesicles (EVs) act as overlooked hubs, transferring ARGs and VFGs from the plastisphere to microbial communities. Globally, EV-producing microbes are widespread in plastisphere samples, with many from potential pathogens, and environmental stressors further amplify this risk, underscoring plastisphere EVs as a critical One Health concern.