Using continental-scale incubations with AI approaches and mechanistic modeling, this study shows that soil minerals and microbes exert strong control over soil carbon decay and microbial carbon use efficiency across the contiguous US, producing high-resolution maps that reveal geographic patterns of soil carbon decomposability.

Humanity has pushed Earth’s life-supporting systems to the brink, accelerated by our failures over the past decade. Our only way to limit the duration and magnitude of temperature overshoot is rapid, coordinated action to mitigate impacts, reverse past damage, and turn knowledge into action to safeguard the future of our planet.

Today’s widely used petroleum-based polymers, which prioritize durability, performance, and disposability, overlook sustainability and result in significant environmental problems. While progress has been made in bio-based and recyclable polymers, these developments often occur individually. In this review, we examined sustainable polymers through three fundamental pillars, namely, renewability, functionality, and circularity, using an integrated “produce-performance-regenerate” framework. Through a SWOT analysis, we highlight key molecular design strategies needed to create scalable, efficient, and genuinely circular polymers that advance the vision of a sustainable materials economy.

Legacy MRV frameworks are failing as US forest carbon sinks falter. This commentary argues for a paradigm shift to a tree-centric digital MRV, built as a hybrid public-private ecosystem. This new architecture can restore credibility, de-risk investment, and empower diverse stewards in a post-Paris world.

Brazil’s rich but sensitive ecosystems face uncertainty amid deep decarbonization efforts that could drive significant land-use changes. Here, using a spatially explicit energy system model, we demonstrate that, with strategic, location-wise planning of renewable energy, including solar, wind, and biofuels, Brazil can supply extensive renewable electricity while safeguarding key conservation areas without major cost increases. Protecting and restoring these lands increases carbon sinks, delivering integrated co-benefits for energy, climate, and ecology.

Dang et al. collected 192 publications about the response of soil microbial richness and abundance to warming, and revealed that future warming would exacerbate the loss of soil microbial richness.

Understanding an actor’s influence in sustainability interventions, and thus their agency, is gaining attention in sustainability science. However, coherent approaches to characterize and analyze networks of influence remain scarce. We propose an actor-process network approach to assess five types of agency based on capitals: allocating human resources, enacting political relevance, influencing financial flows, providing physical goods and assets, and steering social-ecological discourse. Our approach can contribute to discussions on how to distribute roles and responsibilities between diverse actors involved in sustainability transformations.

Climate change alters both wheat yields and where the crop can be grown. This study shows that warming could expand suitable wheat-growing regions by up to 15.7% and that such spatial shifts have the potential to offset climate-induced yield losses, highlighting the importance of including area dynamics in future projections.

Many flood-prone cities occur in deltas. Sea-level rise, land subsidence, and intensifying storm surges threaten larger and more frequent floods. While prior studies assessed individual flood components, none integrated the effect of all flood drivers. Using Shanghai as an example, we employed a dynamically-linked model to evaluate compound flooding. The possibility of a 200-year flood event potentially increases by up to 80% by 2100, far exceeding projections considering single flood components. We discuss the implications for other delta cities, including adaptation needs.

Despite well-established risks from air pollution, consistent quantification of joint health risks and individual pollutant contributions across countries/territories remains lacking. Using health surveillance data from 12 countries/territories, this study introduces an improved index that could more accurately capture and communicate the mortality risks of air pollution than currently used indices. Highlighting O3 and NO2 as emerging key drivers of the risk index across countries/territories, the findings underscore the need for refined risk metrics and more targeted air quality management policies.

This paper presents a framework to assess models and policies for system resilience of the global food system. By evaluating widely used modeling strategies, it highlights significant gaps in adequately capturing systemic resilience and advocates for improving preparedness through new and bespoke models and the communication of limitations and assumptions to stakeholders.

Toxic pollution on croplands—from pesticides, heavy metals, and industrial waste—poses a growing threat to soil health and the safety of crops for consumption. Addressing these contaminants is essential for food security, human well-being, and ecosystem resilience, yet significant challenges remain. In this Voices article, we ask, “What innovations and actions are needed to preserve croplands as a safe, sustainable foundation for the future of food?”.

Achieving climate targets hinges on rapid solar and wind expansion, especially in developing economies. Rising material prices threaten the affordability of this transition, while their long-term impacts remain poorly explored. Here, we incorporate material price dynamics into an integrated assessment model through 2050 and show that long-term price spikes could raise global annual installation costs by up to $228 billion and delay PV and wind power deployment in developing regions by 5–8 years, undermining efficient and equitable transitions.

Global supply chains have helped drive the rapid deployment of solar photovoltaics, but their broader societal benefits are often overlooked. Here, we estimate that imported solar panels in the US displaced 305 TWh of fossil generation, avoided 178 million tons of CO2, and prevented 595 premature deaths between 2014 and 2022. These findings highlight how the international clean energy supply chain delivers substantial climate and health benefits—critical evidence for informing energy policy and supply chain resilience debates.

Scaling biochar for soil fertility, carbon sequestration, and food security faces challenges due to biomass limitations and energy-intensive production. Nano-enabled foliar feeding offers promise but lacks field-scale validation for overall sustainability. We propose an on-site platform producing flash graphene (FG) from a miniscule volume of crop residues. Field applications of just 18 g FG per hectare increased yields by 9%–27% across four staple crops over two seasons while significantly reducing costs and emissions. This innovation paves the way for scalable and sustainable nano-enabled agriculture.

Climate warming increases both above- and below-ground temperatures, altering plant-soil interactions and reshaping soil organic carbon dynamics. This study offers rare experimental evidence on how these interactions influence the responses of different soil organic carbon fractions to warming over time.

(One Earth 8, 101344; June 20, 2025)

This study examines the impact of the 2019–2020 Australian Black Summer wildfires on socioeconomic well-being across poverty, gender, and geographical areas. Using a quasi-experimental approach, the authors find that poorer communities faced greater housing pressure and unpaid work burden, while urban-wildland zones experienced sharp income declines. These findings underscore the importance of incorporating well-being metrics—beyond physical damage—in wildfire recovery planning and provide globally relevant insights for equitable climate disaster response.

Global warming is accelerating the release of perfluoroalkyl acids (PFAAs) from melting glaciers, yet their release fluxes remain poorly quantified on a global scale. This study combines field and literature data with machine learning and a glacier mass balance model to estimate PFAA fluxes from glaciers worldwide. By quantifying fluxes in both dissolved and particle-bound phases under three warming scenarios, the study identifies regional hotspots of concern and defines a critical time window for action. These findings shed light on PFAA cycling in the cryosphere and inform policy responses.