Countries with higher climate readiness receive more international students and countries with greater climate vulnerability receive fewer, according to a global twenty-year study of 1.15 million student flows.

Replacing meat with more sustainable alternatives can halve environmental impacts, but adequate intake of key nutrients such as vitamin B12 must be ensured, suggest integrated assessments of environmental inventories and food composition data.

China’s photovoltaic poverty programs raised economic output by about three percent and reduced sulfur dioxide concentrations by about four micrograms per cubic meter, according to a natural experiment using remote sensing and county-level analysis.

Biochar carbon credit buyers pay for SDG claims, with credits associated with economic and social benefits showing higher prices and those linked to environmental claims lower, in a hedonic pricing study of 171 voluntary carbon market transactions.

Low-rise urban structures have higher carbon mitigation potential from building-integrated photovoltaics than high-rise structures, according to differential analyses across climate zones and urban structures in China

Cattle stocking rates across the Brazilian Amazon are variable and lower on properties with recent deforestation or remote from slaughterhouses, according to a deep-learning approach that detects individual animals in very high-resolution satellite imagery.

Upgrading low-yield cropland instead of expanding cropland area could increase annual grain production and help to preserve biodiversity in northern China, according to analyses of reclamation, yield, and biodiversity data from 2000 to 2020.

Demand-side strategies consistently rank higher across multiple quality of life dimensions than supply-side options according to a multi-country study combining energy system modelling with public perception surveys.

Industrial logging in the Congo Basin produces substantial carbon emissions that could fall by up to half with improved practices, according to a study that estimates timber harvest using satellite data on logging roads and forest disturbance.

A small number of commodity-region combinations dominate food-related biodiversity loss, while global average footprints obscure the true drivers, as revealed by a regionalized, multi-driver assessment of institutional consumption.

Canada’s forest disturbance costs have been rising quickly. This Comment proposes that silviculture must be reframed as a risk mitigation tool under an ‘avoided costs’ framework, as proactive investments become essential to prevent far greater damage to society and ecosystems.

Complex supply chains pose an enormous challenge for decarbonising the chemical industry in the face of pressure to move towards net-zero emissions. A comment by Bakkaloglu and co-authors argues that transparency, traceability, and end-to-end governance can incentivise companies to invest in verified emissions reductions within their own value chains.

Clean technology is needed to meet India’s demand for food and fuel without compromising environmental and human health. Green ammonia production could help to boost low-carbon fuel and nitrogen fertilizer production for domestic use and export, and to innovate energy and food systems.

Successful solutions for a more sustainable world will only become broadly acceptable through vigorous and transparent debate across diverse perspectives. We are launching Communications Sustainability to host these discussions and to inform them with rigorous research.

The loss of major health surveys once backed by the United States Agency for International Development and proposed cuts to environmental programs threaten the tracking of sustainable development. Citizen science can and should be central to building stronger, more resilient data systems.