Annual Review of Environment and Resources - Current Issue

It has been argued that we have now entered the Anthropocene, a proposed epoch in which humans are having a dominant impact on the Earth system. While some geologists have sought to formalize the Anthropocene as beginning in the mid-twentieth century, its social, geophysical, and environmental roots undoubtedly lie deeper in the past. In this review, we highlight the ways in which human activities across the major biomes of our planet significantly altered parts of the Earth system prior to the Industrial Age. We demonstrate ways in which novel, multidisciplinary approaches can provide detailed insights into long-term human–environment–Earth system interactions. We argue that there is clear evidence for lasting Earth system legacies of pre-Industrial human societies and that archaeology, paleoecology, and historical ecology can provide important, practical insights to help navigate current and future relationships with the planet in more equitable and sustainable ways.

This article catalogs major recent trends in ecological science fiction (sf), focused primarily on sf published after the completion of N.K. Jemisin's paradigm-setting Broken Earth trilogy in 2017. Major subdivisions in the genre include dystopian and antiutopian narratives about climate collapse, technocratic solutionism, reckoning with climate change as a colonial project, intergenerational conflict, and posthuman formulation. Noting that sf both as literary genre and as fan community encompasses a wide range of political perspectives ranging from reactionary hypercapitalism to utopian socialism, the article does not seek to advance any particular political position but rather seeks to name the major currents of political and ethical debate within sf in this moment of ecological crisis. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the way the sf genre, in reframing the present as the history of multiple possible futures, calls on us to act to shape that future toward human thriving.

We review the functioning and sustainability of coastal marshes and mangroves. Urbanized humans have a 7,000-year-old enduring relationship to coastal wetlands. Wetlands include marshes, salt flats, and saline and freshwater forests. Coastal wetlands occur in all climate zones but are most abundant in deltas. Mangroves are tropical, whereas marshes occur from tropical to boreal areas. Quantification of coastal wetland areas has advanced in recent years but is still insufficiently accurate. Climate change and sea-level rise are predicted to lead to significant wetland losses and other impacts on coastal wetlands and the humans associated with them. Landward migration and coastal retreat are not expected to significantly reduce coastal wetland losses. Nitrogen watershed inputs are unlikely to alter coastal marsh stability because watershed loadings are mostly significantly lower than those in fertilization studies that show decreased belowground biomass and increased decomposition of soil organic matter. Blue carbon is not expected to significantly reduce climate impacts. The high values of ecosystem goods and services of wetlands are expected to be reduced by area losses. Humans have had strong impacts on coastal wetlands in the Holocene, and these impacts are expected to increase in the Anthropocene.

In this review, we thoroughly analyze the state of global rivers, focusing on their physical and ecological characteristics as well as management strategies. The review results have helped us generate four recommendations. Firstly, rivers should be managed under a legally binding global accord at the basin level. Secondly, challenges related to river pollution and inappropriate project implementation can be mitigated by adopting newly defined strategic environmental assessments and the United Nations System of Environmental Economic Accounting. Thirdly, we need data from the latest scientific sources, such as geospatial sources, to better understand rivers at different scales as composite systems. The last recommendation calls for taking into account climate change concerns in river management approaches. We also outline a proposition for developing a river monitoring and assessment program in order to perform comprehensive and planet-wide river assessment. The article elaborates on the strategies for achieving these recommendations.

This article reviews shared mobility, a prominent urban transportation concept with considerable potential to contribute to more sustainable urban mobility. Shared passenger mobility spans diverse services, often leveraging technological advances and disruptions such as smartphones and data analytics to optimize transport resources. Given the broad range of services, a shared mobility taxonomy is proposed, accommodating evolving services. Key challenges for delivering efficient and effective shared mobility services with lower environmental impacts are also identified. Finally, the International Transport Forum transport demand models are used to analyze policy implications and potential effects quantitatively. This article presents a possible scenario for the global evolution of these services to 2050. Results emphasize shared mobility's role in transport decarbonization in the present and future and show that shared mobility may reduce resource use and mobility externalities (e.g., CO2, local pollutants, congestion, urban space use) but that the uptake will differ between Global South and Global North cities.

This article reviews Western perspectives—in a fruitful dialogue with non-Western perspectives—on the climate emergency and artistic experiences amid the ongoing debate about futures currently at stake in the climate crisis or climate emergency. Moving beyond the various ways of naming this crisis, we focus on how art can communicate, envision, and activate ways of inhabiting this problem, opening communities to an other-than-human coexistence and reconfiguring matters as we understand them in a geological, natural, or material sense. The analyses indicate that, instead of aiming at a singular solution, multiple exercises and imaginative and speculative avenues of narratives can tell different stories and envision alternative futures. If the climate crisis ignited in the Anthropocene is a shared crisis—both political and aesthetic—then art, inseparable from life and hence nature, holds a crucial role in nurturing care and the potency of imagining other possible worlds.

Developing transformative pathways for industry's compliance with international climate targets requires model-based insights into how supply- and demand-side measures affect industry, material cycles, global supply chains, socioeconomic activities, and service provisioning that support societal well-being. We review the recent literature modeling the industrial system in low energy and material demand futures, which mitigates environmental impacts without relying on risky future negative emissions and technological fixes. We identify 77 innovative studies drawing on nine distinct industry modeling traditions. We critically assess system definitions and scopes, biophysical and thermodynamic consistency, granularity and heterogeneity, and operationalization of demand and service provisioning. We find that combined supply- and demand-side measures could reduce current economy-wide material use by 56%, energy use by 40% to 60%, and greenhouse gas emissions by 70% to net zero. We call for strengthened interdisciplinary collaborations between industry modeling traditions and demand-side research to produce more insightful scenarios, and we discuss challenges and recommendations for this emerging field.

Nutrient recovery from waste is a promising strategy to conserve inputs while reducing nutrient discharge to the natural environment. Multiple waste streams have shown promise with respect to nutrient recovery. Multiple technologies also show promise at a pilot or full scale. These technologies, however, must not exacerbate other environmental issues, with excessive energy use, unsustainable material extraction (e.g., mineral extraction, cement use), or toxin release into the environment. Such technologies must also be feasible from economic and social perspectives. Work, therefore, should focus on both improving our current suite of available technologies for nutrient recovery from waste and framing policies that blend affordability with incentives, thereby fostering an environment conducive to innovation and adoption of sustainable approaches. This review considers the issues associated with nutrient recovery from waste, including technical feasibility and economic, environmental, and social factors, and identifies current knowledge gaps and emerging opportunities for nutrient waste recovery.

Globally, the production of concrete is responsible for 5% to 8% of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Cement, a primary ingredient in concrete, forms a glue that holds concrete together when combined with water. Cement embodies approximately 90% of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with concrete production, and decarbonization methods focus primarily on cement production. But mitigation strategies can accrue throughout the concrete life cycle. Decarbonization strategies in cement manufacture, use, and disposal can be rapidly implemented to address the global challenge of equitably meeting societal needs and climate goals. This review describes (a) the development of our reliance on cement and concrete and the consequent environmental impacts, (b) pathways to decarbonization throughout the concrete value chain, and (c) alternative resources that can be leveraged to further reduce emissions while meeting global demands. We close by highlighting a research agenda to mitigate the climate damages from our continued dependence on cement.

Solar geoengineering, also called sunlight reflection or solar radiation modification (SRM), is a potential climate response that would cool the Earth's surface and reduce many other climate changes by scattering on order 1% of incoming sunlight back to space. SRM can only imperfectly correct for elevated greenhouse gases, but it might complement other climate responses to reduce risks, while also bringing new risks and new challenges to global governance. As climate alarm and calls for effective near-term action mount, SRM is attracting sharply increased attention and controversy, with many calls for expanded research and governance consultations along with ongoing concerns about risks, misuse, or overreliance. We review SRM's history, methods, potential uses and impacts, and governance needs, prioritizing the approach that is most prominent and promising, stratospheric aerosol injection. We identify several policy-relevant characteristics of SRM interventions and identify four narratives that capture current arguments over how SRM might be developed or used in sociopolitical context to either beneficial or destructive effect, with implications for near-term research, assessment, and governance activity.

This review surveys recent evidence on environmental security, bringing diverse approaches to the subject and evidence relating to different environmental issues into conversation with one another. We focus on the five environmental issues most commonly viewed as having conflict or security effects: climate change, water, forests and deforestation, biodiversity and conservation, and mining and industrial pollution. For each issue, we consider evidence along three dimensions: the impacts of environmental variables on violent conflict, the conflict impacts of policy and development interventions vis-à-vis these environmental issues, and their global policy framing and institutionalization. Through this, we draw particular attention to the poverty and/or inconsistency of the evidence relating to environmental variations, which stands in stark contrast to the extensive evidence on policy and development interventions; noting that policymakers have been much more concerned with the former theme than the latter, we call for this imbalance to be addressed.

Conservation of biodiversity is above all else an exercise in human persuasion. Human behavior drives all substantive threats to biodiversity; therefore, influencing it is the only path to mitigating the current extinction crisis. We review the literature across three different axes to highlight current evidence on influencing human behavior for conservation. First, we look at behavioral interventions to mitigate different threats, from pollution and climate change to invasive species and human disturbance. Next, we examine interventions focused on different stakeholders, from voters, investors, and environmental managers to consumers, producers, and extractors. Finally, we review delivery channels, ranging from mass and social media to interventions involving changes to the physical environment or carried out in person. We highlight key gaps, including the lack of scale and robust impact evaluation of most interventions, and the need to prioritize behaviors, overcome the reproducibility crisis, and deal with inequality when designing and implementing behavior change interventions.

This review explores the relationships between gender and climate change, focusing on Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. It draws attention to the differences in how women, men, and others are impacted by climate change, emphasizing vulnerabilities due to lack of access to resources and decision-making authority. We highlight the role gender-sensitive environmental institutions have in moderating how gender relations are affected by climate change. We assess gender sensitivity in environmental institutions, climate adaptation, and mitigation initiatives through regional comparisons, considering the different roles, responsibilities, and demands of women, men, and other intersectional groups within policies and initiatives to identify opportunities and difficulties in enacting gender-sensitive policies. The analysis shows widespread recognition of the significance of tackling gender-related concerns in the context of climate change and concludes that while progress is evident, there is room for improvement in addressing biases, stereotypes, and specific challenges, especially concerning climate change.

This review examines the promises and pitfalls of multistakeholder partnerships (MSPs) for sustainable development. We take stock of the literature on the creation, effectiveness, and legitimacy of MSPs and focus on recent research on MSPs committed to achieving the 2030 Agenda and United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The 2030 Agenda conceives of MSPs as vehicles to achieve large-scale sustainability transformations. Yet, research on MSPs under earlier sustainable development initiatives found that they had limited effectiveness and significant legitimacy deficits. We show that recent research on SDG partnerships suggests they reproduce many of the shortcomings of their predecessors and so are unlikely to foster synergies and minimize trade-offs between areas of sustainable development to deliver transformations on a global scale. We also examine recent research on the prospects of governing MSPs to enhance accountability and ensure better institutional designs for achieving transformations, highlighting challenges arising from international political contestation.

Multisectoral integration has been at the core of sustainability debates and is continuously rearticulated through different concepts. Following the 2007–2008 financial, food, and energy crises, a new concept, the water–energy–food nexus, gained prominence to identify trade-offs and synergies between water, energy, and food systems and guide the development of cross-sectoral policies. The nexus is essentially a systems-based perspective that explicitly recognizes these three systems as both interconnected and interdependent, and thus integrated approaches are required that move beyond sectoral, policy, and disciplinary silos. The nexus is also a political process, one in which the interplay of different types of power, as well as the actors wielding them, is not just a procedurally technical one. This tension between the nexus as a complex system and the nexus as a political process constitutes the core debating idea, in terms of feasibility, methods, and theory, in this article.

Facing the world's ecological, economic, and social challenges requires us to connect the concepts of justice, sustainability, and transitions. Bridging and discussing heterogeneous fields, we argue that these concepts need to complement each other, and we present just sustainability transitions (JUSTRAs) to do so. To define JUSTRAs, we review the state-of-the-art literature, focusing on the understanding of these three concepts and their pairings in various disciplinary fields and empirical settings (e.g., environmental justice, just transitions, sustainability transitions, energy justice, food justice, urban justice). We center marginalized voices to highlight the processes of radical transformative change that JUSTRAs seek. We offer three analytical lenses that further the understanding of JUSTRAs: politics, power, and prefiguration. We argue that these complementary lenses are necessary to remake the world in both critical and pragmatic ways. Finally, we present a research agenda on JUSTRAs, foregrounding three complementary modes of inquiry: analyzing, critiquing, designing.

Covering two-thirds of the ocean and half of the planet's surface, the high seas are increasingly the focus of commercial activity and conservation ambitions. Contrary to narratives of a lawless frontier, they are governed by a dense network of sectoral institutions for shipping, fisheries, and other industries, although these collectively deal with conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity in a fragmented and uneven manner. These gaps were the subject of nearly 20 years of negotiation, resulting in the adoption of the Agreement on Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction in June 2023. The Agreement was designed to address access and benefit sharing associated with marine genetic resources; the establishment of area-based management tools such as marine protected areas, Environmental Impact Assessments, and capacity building; and the transfer of marine technology. Achieving coherence across public and private governance mechanisms will be a significant challenge as human activity increases on the high seas, but it is key to achieving ocean sustainability goals.

As a metric for economic progress, gross domestic product (GDP) has been criticized for hiding the destruction of natural capital and failing to improve happiness/human well-being. Consequently, many studies unanimously argued for a beyond GDP approach, which led to a proliferation of ensuing metrics. However, the proliferation leads to confusion as it complicates matters for policymakers looking to these metrics to inform coherent development objectives and plans. Our article aims to assess theoretical and empirical efforts to measure human progress based on these notions of well-being and sustainability and critically analyze the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches. We explore systematic trends in indicator activity in the related literature and, in doing so, organize our discussion around the distinct and prominent perspectives that can be identified. We illustrate with a case study on India how divergent matrices, though not beyond comprehension, increase the complexity.

Driven by the need for integrated management of groundwater (GW) and surface water (SW), quantification of GW–SW interactions and associated contaminant transport has become increasingly important. This is due to their substantial impact on water quantity and quality. In this review, we provide an overview of the methods developed over the past several decades to investigate GW–SW interactions. These methods include geophysical, hydrometric, and tracer techniques, as well as various modeling approaches. Different methods reveal valuable information on GW–SW interactions at different scales with their respective advantages and limitations. Interpreting data from these techniques can be challenging due to factors like scale effects, heterogeneous hydrogeological conditions, sediment variability, and complex spatiotemporal connections between GW and SW. To facilitate the selection of appropriate methods for specific sites, we discuss the strengths, weaknesses, and challenges of each technique, and we offer perspectives on knowledge gaps in the current science.

Using the socio-ecological model of social and behavior change communication, our review highlights current trends in understanding message design factors and media technologies promoting proenvironment and climate mitigative behaviors. We explain that much of this research has focused on the individual level, and relatively few studies have been conducted at the interpersonal and community levels. With respect to changing communication ecology, we note the potential for research on the use of social media platforms to influence positive behavior changes and, conversely, the challenges of misinformation and its impact on behavior shifts. This area requires further investigation as these communication platforms transform and become increasingly relevant. Additionally, we need to explicate the long-term shifts and impacts of behavior change interventions as well as track behaviors over time. Overall, our review underscores the continued need for research across different geographical, sociopolitical, and technological contexts.

Biodiversity metrics are increasingly in demand for informing government, business, and civil society decisions. However, it is not always clear to end users how these metrics differ or for what purpose they are best suited. We seek to answer these questions using a database of 573 biodiversity-related metrics, indicators, indices, and layers, which address aspects of genetic diversity, species, and ecosystems. We provide examples of indicators and their uses within the state–pressure–response–benefits framework that is widely used in conservation science. Considering complementarity across this framework, we recommend a small number of metrics considered most pertinent for use in decision-making by governments and businesses. We conclude by highlighting five future directions: increasing the importance of national metrics, ensuring wider uptake of business metrics, agreeing on a minimum set of metrics for government and business use, automating metric calculation through use of technology, and generating sustainable funding for metric production.