‘Discourses of climate delay’ pervade current debates on climate action. These discourses accept the existence of climate change, but justify inaction or inadequate efforts. In contemporary discussions on what actions should be taken, by whom and how fast, proponents of climate delay would argue for minimal action or action taken by others. They focus attention on the negative social effects of climate policies and raise doubt that mitigation is possible. Here, we outline the common features of climate delay discourses and provide a guide to identifying them.

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.

Ecosystems across the globe are vulnerable to the effects of climate change, as are the communities that depend on them. However, ecosystems can also protect people from climate change impacts. As the evidence base strengthens, nature-based solutions (NbS) are increasingly prominent in climate change policy, especially in developing nations. Yet intentions rarely translate into measurable, evidence-based targets. As Paris Agreement signatories revise their Nationally Determined Contributions, we argue that NbS are key to meeting global goals for climate and biodiversity, and we urge researchers to work more closely with policy-makers to identify targets that benefit both people and ecosystems.

The distribution of household carbon footprints is largely unequal within and across countries. Here, we explore household-level consumption data to illustrate the distribution of carbon footprints and consumption within 26 European Union countries, regions and social groups. The analysis further sheds light on the relationships between carbon footprints and socially desirable outcomes such as income, equality, education, nutrition, sanitation, employment and adequate living conditions.

The world agreed to achieve 17 Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. Nine planetary boundaries set an upper limit to Earth system impacts of human activity in the long run. Conventional efforts to achieve the 14 socio-economic goals will raise pressure on planetary boundaries, moving the world away from the three environmental SDGs. We have created a simple model, Earth3, to measure how much environmental damage follows from achievement of the 14 socio-economic goals, and we propose an index to track effects on people's wellbeing. Extraordinary efforts will be needed to achieve all SDGs within planetary boundaries.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Decisions on the use of nature reflect the values and rights of individuals, communities and society at large. The values of nature are expressed through cultural norms, rules and legislation, and they can be elicited using a wide range of tools, including those of economics. None of the approaches to elicit peoples’ values are neutral. Unequal power relations influence valuation and decision-making and are at the core of most environmental conflicts. As actors in sustainability thinking, environmental scientists and practitioners are becoming more aware of their own posture, normative stance, responsibility and relative power in society. Based on a transdisciplinary workshop, our perspective paper provides a normative basis for this new community of scientists and practitioners engaged in the plural valuation of nature.

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.

Nature and culture are intricately linked and the rapid loss of both biological and cultural diversity around the globe has led to increasing concerns about its effects on sustainability. Important efforts to understand biocultural relations and bolster sustainable practices have been made by scientists, local communities, civil society organizations and policy makers. In spite of their efforts, a stronger articulation between sectors and biocultural discourses is needed for a broader transformative impact. Here, we analyse the connections between prominent biocultural discourses and discuss how the biocultural paradigm can contribute to both local and global sustainability.

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.

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.

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.

There is a call to change societies to become more sustainable. We examine how the concept of sustainability transformation has been used and find that it has been defined in many ways. The concept is still used without many real-world examples – we found only four studies that had assessed whether a multi-sectoral sustainability transformation had taken place. There is a need to further clarify what sustainability transformation means and how it can be assessed.