Global sustainability challenges and their impact on society have been well-documented in recent years, such as more intense extreme weather events, environmental degradation, as well as ecosystem and biodiversity loss. These challenges require a united effort of scientists from multiple disciplines with stakeholders, including government, non-government organizations, corporate industry, and members of the general public, with the aim to generate integrated knowledge with real-world applicability. Yet, there continues to be challenges for these types of collaboration. In this commentary, we describe processes of collective unlearning that serve to decenter academia in collaborations leading to a more equitable positioning of practitioners engaged in collaborative global sustainability research.

The principal policy focus for food has been to increase agricultural productivity and to liberalize markets allowing globalized trade. This focus has led to huge growth in the supply of agricultural produce, more calories becoming available, and price declining. The availability of cheaper calories increasingly underpins diets creating malnourishment through obesity, and global competition incentivizes producers who can produce the most, cheaply, typically with environmental damage. We propose re-focusing, away from yields per unit input, to the food system's overall productivity and efficiency – the number of people that can be fed healthily and sustainably per unit input.

This article raises awareness of how countries can leverage space and space technologies to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through concrete examples. Space science, technology and applications can support a range of pro-developmental activities, such as agricultural planning, biodiversity protection, tele-health and disaster management. United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) helps countries to use space technology in all of these areas, through capacity building and partnerships with government and private sector entities to expand access to space, especially for developing countries. This article also outlines the work of UNOOSA in promoting increased participation of women in the space sector and in STEM careers.

In this paper we discuss current challenges to the sustainability concept. This article focuses on seven dimensions of the concept. These dimensions are crucial for understanding sustainability. Even today, the literature contains basic misunderstandings about these seven dimensions. This article sketches such fallacies in the context of global and planetary sustainability. The sustainability concept has been criticized as a content-empty ‘fuzzy notion’ or non-committal ‘all-purpose glue’. This article thus has a critical intention of reflecting the sustainability concept accurately. The aim is to contribute a better understanding of the concept.

Manhattan, Berlin and New Delhi all need to take action to adapt to climate change and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. While case studies on these cities provide valuable insights, comparability and scalability remain sidelined. It is therefore timely to review the state-of-the-art in data infrastructures, including earth observations, social media data, and how they could be better integrated to advance climate change science in cities and urban areas. We present three routes for expanding knowledge on global urban areas: mainstreaming data collections, amplifying the use of big data and taking further advantage of computational methods to analyse qualitative data to gain new insights. These data-based approaches have the potential to upscale urban climate solutions and effect change at the global scale.

Global land is turning into an increasingly scarce resource. We here present a comprehensive assessment of co-occuring land-use change from 2000 until 2010, compiling existing spatially explicit data sources for different land uses, and building on a rich literature addressing specific land-use changes in all world regions. This review systematically categorizes patterns of land use, including regional urbanization and agricultural expansion but also globally telecoupled land-use change for all world regions. Managing land-use change patterns across the globe requires global governance.

The El Niño event in 2015/2016 was one of the strongest since at least 1950. Through surveys and interviews with key informants, we found businesses in the capital cities of Zambia, Botswana and Kenya experienced major disruption to their activities from El Niño related hydroelectric load shedding, water supply disruption and flooding, respectively. Yet, during the 2015/2016 El Niño, fluctuations in precipitation were not extreme considering the strength of the El Niño event. Results therefore highlight that even fairly moderate precipitation anomalies can contribute to major disruption to economic activity. Addressing the risk of disruption – and supporting the private sector to adapt – is a development priority.

It is no longer possible nor desirable to address the dual challenges of equity and sustainability separately. Instead, they require new thinking and approaches which recognize their interlinkages, as well as the multiple perspectives and dimensions involved. We illustrate how equity and sustainability are intertwined, and how a complex social–ecological systems lens brings together advances from across the social and natural sciences to show how (in)equity and (un)sustainability are produced by the interactions and dynamics of coupled social–ecological systems. This should help understand which possible pathways could lead to sustainable and fair futures.

In the face of limited carbon budgets, negative emissions technologies (NETs) offer hopes of removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. It is difficult to determine whether the prospect of NETs is significantly deterring or delaying timely action to cut emissions. This paper sets out a novel theoretical perspective to this challenge, enabling analysis that accounts for interactions between technologies, society and political and economic power. The paper argues that, seen in this light, the scope of NETs to substitute for mitigation may be easily exaggerated, and thus that the risk of harm from mitigation deterrence should be taken seriously.

Our current global food system – from food production to consumption, including manufacture, packaging, transport, retail and associated businesses – is responsible for extensive negative social and environmental impacts which threaten the long-term well-being of society. This has led to increasing calls from science–policy organizations for major reform and transformation of the global food system. However, our knowledge regarding food system transformations is fragmented and this is hindering the development of co-ordinated solutions. Here, we collate recent research across several academic disciplines and sectors in order to better understand the mechanisms that ‘lock-in’ food systems in unsustainable states.

In the post-Paris political landscape, the relationship between science and politics is changing. We discuss what this means for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), using recent controversies over negative emissions technologies (NETs) as a window into the fraught politics of producing policy-relevant pathways and scenarios. We suggest that pathways and scenarios have a ‘world-making’ power, potentially shaping the world in their own image and creating new political realities. Assessment bodies like the IPCC need to reflect on this power, and the implications of changing political contexts, in new ways.

Limiting dangerous climate change is widely believed to require negative emissions. This prospect has sparked concerns about whether negative emissions could be scaled up quickly enough, along with concerns about their likely ethical costs. Building upon scenario modelling, this paper examines ethical concerns with negative emissions via the comparison of three alternate climate futures. This paper shows that the severity of concerns depends upon implementation conditions, and especially the extent of deferred mitigation. Negative emissions can be a valuable means of limiting dangerous climate change, or an unjust gamble against the future.

Under the Paris Agreement, nations have committed to preventing dangerous global warming. Scenarios for achieving net-zero emissions in the second half of this century depend on land (forests and bioenergy) to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Modelled levels of land-based mitigation could reduce the availability of productive agricultural land, and encroach on natural land, with potentially significant social and environmental consequences. However, these issues are poorly recognized in the policy-uptake of modelled outputs. Understanding how science and policy interact to produce expectations about mitigation pathways allows us to consider the trade-offs inherent in relying on land for mitigation.

Biomass energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is represented in many integrated assessment models as a keystone technology in delivering the Paris Agreement on climate change. This paper explores six key challenges in relation to large scale BECCS deployment and considers ways to address these challenges. Research needs to consider how BECCS fits in the context of other mitigation approaches, how it can be accommodated within existing policy drivers and goals, identify where it fits within the wider socioeconomic landscape, and ensure that genuine net negative emissions can be delivered on a global scale.

A major challenge in addressing the loss of benefits and services provided by the natural environment is that it can be difficult to find ways for those who benefit from them to pay for their preservation. We examine one such context in Malawi, where erosion from soils disturbed by agriculture affects not only farmers’ incomes, but also damages aquatic habitat and inhibits the storage and hydropower potential of dams downstream. We demonstrate that payments from hydropower producers to farmers to maintain land cover and prevent erosion can have benefits for all parties involved.

Technologies and practices to remove carbon from the atmosphere (‘negative emissions technologies’) will be challenging to scale-up. Efforts to incentivize or govern their scale-up globally risk failing if they miss the social challenges. This paper analyzes prospective challenges for negative emissions through examining how decarbonization practices are evolving in one particular landscape: the Imperial Valley in southeast California, a desert landscape engineered for industrial agriculture. Based on semi-structured interviews and site visits, this paper examines how community actors have received, participated in, imagined or contested new energy technologies and climate practices, and draws out takeaways for negative emissions policy.

Most domestic environmental laws control the act of emitting pollutants into the environment. As a result, they do not apply squarely to negative emissions technologies (NETs) that remove ambient contaminants and do not emit pollutants themselves. As a result, current US environmental laws cannot readily govern a NET unless it has features that would typically allow regulation of a clean-up, such as ownership of the polluted resources, being at fault for polluting them or instituting projects to restore them. We should reinterpret such laws to focus on actual disruption or harm to the environment instead of using emission of pollutants as a proxy for ecological damage.