Rivers are crucial to the water cycle, linking the landscape to the sea. Human activities, including effluent discharge, water use and fisheries, have transformed the resilience of many rivers around the globe. Sustainable development goal (SDG) 14 prioritizes addressing many of the same issues in marine ecosystems. This review illustrates how rivers contribute directly and indirectly to SDG 14 outcomes, and also provides ways to potentially address them through a river to sea view on policy, management and research.

The United Nations initiated the SDGs to produce ‘a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future’. Established in 2015, progress of SDGs directed at the aquatic environment is slow despite an encroaching 2030 deadline. The modification of flow regimes combined with other anthropogenic pressures underpin ecological impacts across aquatic ecosystems. Current SDG 14 targets (life below water) do not incorporate the interrelationships of rivers and marine systems systematically, nor do they provide recommendations on how to improve existing management and policy in a comprehensive manner. Therefore, this review aims to illustrate the linkages between rivers and marine ecosystems concerning the SDG 14 targets and to illustrate land to sea-based strategies to reach sustainability goals. We provide an applied case study to show how opportunities can be explored. We review three major areas where mutual opportunities are present: (1) rivers contribute to marine and estuary ecosystem resilience (targets 14.1, 14.2, 14.3, 14.5); (2) resilient rivers are part of the global fisheries sustainability concerns (targets 14.4, 14.6, 14.7, 14.B) and (3) enhancing marine policy and research from a river and environmental flows perspective (targets 14.A, 14.C).

Restoring resilience to rivers and their environmental flows helps fulfil SDG 14.

Negative emissions technologies (NETs) have received increasing interest in recent years as a potential part of a portfolio of measures to address anthropogenic climate change, in particular following the 2015 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Paris Agreement and the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report ‘Global Warming of 1.5 °C’. This increasing significance for global climate policy is faced with a multitude of open questions regarding, among others, the geopolitical implications of large-scale use of NETs. This paper outlines what we can learn for the possible geopolitical futures of NETs from existing international ‘green’ approaches.

We contribute to assessing political implications of NET scenarios, addressing the following question: What are potential geopolitical challenges, conflicts, and consequences of a large-scale deployment of three NETs, namely afforestation, bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), and direct air capture and carbon storage (DACCS)? We turn to the two cases of renewable energies and reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation for answers. We find that, first, not only afforestation, but also BECCS and even DACCS would have a geopolitical impact due to their requirements of territory – in the latter two cases, for instance, due to requirements for appropriate carbon storage space. Second, the material requirements of various NETs might also impact geopolitical constellations and induce conflict, providing certain countries and regions of the world with new leverage in the case of large-scale deployment, for instance those which can provide raw materials for fertilizer (for afforestation and BECCS) or energy generation (for DACCS). Third, discursive construction of space and identity might lead to very interesting new patterns of contestation, for instance if specific nation-states can successfully construct an identity of front-running climate protectors and use this to put pressure on other states.

What might be geopolitical implications of using NETs on a large scale to counteract anthropogenic climate change?

A wide variety of social innovations exist today that offer urgently needed pathways for transforming societal systems into more just, sustainable and regenerative ways of organising human existence on this planet. However, a more systematic and practically useful understanding is needed of how individuals and organisations can strengthen the transformative capacity of people working on connecting, spreading, maturing and structurally embedding these innovations. This study presents an updated conceptual framework of network leadership roles and practices, and describes how these can contribute to more widespread, systemic and lasting impact of social innovations.

This study tests and refines a conceptual framework, describing the roles and practices of network leadership that can support the development of transformative capacities, in the context of social innovation networks. Such capacities include spreading social innovations in wider society, embedding them in policy and public discourse, and generating continuity and further development of social innovation activities. We studied five cases of transnational social innovation networks involving community-led and student-led sustainability initiatives. Practitioners in these networks were asked to rate and comment on the perceived recognisability and importance of network leadership roles and practices, as well as challenges, which we articulated in a previous study and further developed in the current study through participant observation and document analyses. This resulted in a revision of the roles and practices, the identification of relations between roles and a better understanding of how they can contribute to transformative capacity development. The interviews also helped to clarify the practical usefulness of the framework, suggesting possible applications for evaluating, prioritising and aligning roles performed by various individuals and organisations. The findings are relevant for better understanding and guiding distributed agency in transformative social innovation networks.

Roles and practices for network leadership to enable more widespread, systemic and lasting impact of social innovation.

Models are increasingly used to inform the transformation of human–Earth systems towards a sustainable future, aligned with the sustainable development goals (SDGs). We argue that a greater diversity of models ought to be used for sustainability analysis to better address complexity and uncertainty. We articulate the steps to model global change socioeconomic and climatic scenarios with new models. Through these steps, we generate new scenario projections using a human–Earth system dynamics model. Our modelling brings new insights about the sensitivity of sustainability trends to future uncertainty and their alignment with or divergence from previous model-based scenario projections.

The future uncertainty and complexity of alternative socioeconomic and climatic scenarios challenge the model-based analysis of sustainable development. Obtaining robust insights requires a systematic processing of uncertainty and complexity not only in input assumptions, but also in the diversity of model structures that simulates the multisectoral dynamics of human and Earth system interactions. Here, we implement the global change scenarios, that is, the shared socioeconomic pathways and the representative concentration pathways, in a feedback-rich, integrated assessment model (IAM) of human–Earth system dynamics, called FeliX, to serve two aims: (1) to provide modellers with well-defined steps for the adoption of established scenarios in new IAMs and (2) to explore the impacts of model uncertainty and its structural complexity on the projection of these scenarios for sustainable development. Our modelling shows internally consistent scenario storylines across sectors, yet with quantitatively different realisations of these scenarios compared to other IAMs due to the new model's structural complexity. The results highlight the importance of enumerating global change scenarios and their uncertainty exploration with a diversity of models of different input assumptions and structures to capture a wider variety of future possibilities and sustainability indicators.

New study highlights the importance of global change scenario analysis with new, SDG-focused IAMs.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide an integrated and ambitious roadmap for sustainable development by 2030. National implementation will be crucial and there is an urgent need to understand the scale and pace of transformations to achieve the goals. There is also concern that achieving socio-economic objectives will undermine longer-term environmental sustainability. This study uses modelling to explore how different policy and investment settings can enable the necessary transformations, adopting Fiji as a use-case. Modest investment over the coming decade can deliver improved performance. However, far more ambitious actions are needed to accelerate progress while managing long-term trade-offs with environmental objectives.

This paper presents the results from a national scenario modelling study for Fiji with broader relevance for other countries seeking to achieve the SDGs. We develop and simulate a business-as-usual and six alternative future scenarios using the integrated (iSDG-Fiji) system dynamics model and evaluate their performance on the SDGs in 2030 and global planetary boundaries (PBs) and the ‘safe and just space’ (SJS) framework in 2050. Modest investment over the coming decade through a ‘sustainability transition’ scenario accelerates SDG progress from 40% to 70% by 2030 but fails to meet all SJS thresholds. Greatly scaling up investment and ambition through an SDG transformation scenario highlights possibilities for Fiji to accelerate progress to 83% by 2030 while improving SJS performance. The scale of investment is highly ambitious and could not be delivered without scaled-up international support, but despite this investment progress still falls short. The analysis highlights where key trade-offs remain as well as options to address these, however closing the gap to 100% achievement will prove very challenging. The approach and findings are relevant to other countries with similar characteristics to increase the understanding of the transformations needed to achieve the SDGs within PBs in different country contexts.

How can countries accelerate progress on the SDGs by 2030 while ensuring longer-term coherence with climate and sustainability thresholds?

To decrease the negative impacts of the coronavirus outbreak on human health, governments have implemented wide-ranging control measures. Moreover, they were urged to tackle a new challenge in energy policies to supply a new form of demand derived from new lifestyles of citizens and different energy consumption patterns. This article investigates the impacts of these changes on climate change and human health (due to air pollution) as a challenge for both citizens and governments in four countries: Colombia, France, the Netherlands, and Portugal.

The emergence of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has been associated with global challenges in both energy supply and demand. Numerous articles have discussed the potential benefits of COVID-19 for our planet to mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and air pollutants. By bringing the emissions from the energy production together with the air quality indicators, this article studies the impact on climate change and human health due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the consequent changes in energy policies of governments as well as lifestyles in different societies. This study shows that in spite of having a reduction, the GHG emissions might go back to previous or higher levels if governments do not see this pandemic as an opportunity to promote the use of renewable energies, which are becoming cheaper than non-renewables. Additionally, lower energy demand and less anthropogenic activities do not necessarily result in lower GHG emissions from energy production. Our results highlight the need for revising the policies and decisions of both governments and citizens, as temporary reductions in the levels of energy demand and air pollutants can easily be counterbalanced by adverse effects, known as the ‘rebound effect.’

How did the changes in energy consumption and production due to COVID-19 affect climate change and human health in different countries?

Implicit in the UN's Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Agenda is the notion that environmental sustainability is intertwined with, and underpins, the 17 Goals. Yet the language of the Goals, and their Targets and indicators is blind to the myriad ways in which nature supports people's health and wealth – which we argue represents a key impediment to progress. Using examples of nature–human wellbeing linkages, we assess the language of all 169 Targets to identify urgent research, policy, and action needed to spotlight and leverage nature's foundational role, to help enable truly sustainable development for all.

Nature's foundational role in helping achieve the SDGs is implicit rather than explicit in the language of SDGs Goals, Targets, and indicators. Drawing from the scientific literature describing how nature underpins human wellbeing, we carry out a systematic assessment of the language of all 169 Targets, categorizing which Targets are dependent upon nature for their achievement, could harm nature if attained through business-as-usual actions, or may synergistically benefit nature through their attainment. We find that half are dependent upon nature for their achievement – yet for more than two-thirds of those nature's role goes unstated and risks being downplayed or ignored. Moreover, while achieving the overwhelming majority of the 169 Targets could potentially benefit nature, more than 60% are likely to deliver ‘mixed outcomes’ – benefitting or harming nature depending on how they're achieved. Furthermore, of the 241 official indicators <5% track nature's role in achieving the parent Target. Our analysis provides insights important for increasing effectiveness across the SDG agenda regarding where to invest, how to enhance synergies and limit unanticipated impacts, and how to measure success. It also suggests a path for integrating the ‘nature that people need’ to achieve the SDGs into the CBD's post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework.

Harmonizing links between the SDGs and the CBD's post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework is vital for promoting sustainable development

The ‘last mile’ is a transportation planning term that describes the movement of people and goods from a transportation hub to a final destination; a local place such as a home or a shop. This is the final step of the logistics process that unites the product with its new owner. We present and explain challenges of science-guided adaptation at the local level, and how this is an equivalent ‘last mile’ challenge for climate adaptation.

The ‘last mile’ issue, a term used in transportation planning, describes the movement of people and goods from a transportation hub to a final destination, a local place such as a home or a shop. This is the critical final step of the logistics process that unites the product with its new owner, and the point of the value chain. This analogy aptly describes the last steps between presenting scientific evidence of climate change to decision-makers for use in local adaptation and planning. Climate change data (observational and model simulation data e.g. climate change projections and predictions) remain under-utilised, especially by local institutions and actors for which adaptation is a priority. The assumptions and assertions of the classical data–information–knowledge–wisdom are challenged, and a derivative form of the information hierarchy is proposed. Elements of the classical information hierarchy are offset by four balancing elements of access (to data); usability (of information); governance (of knowledge) and politics (of wisdom). These balancing elements and their relatedness coincide with newer models of innovation relating to the interaction between different stakeholders across the different levels of governance, the inclusion of stakeholder expectations, transparency and accountability.

Climate data to wise decision-making in the ‘last mile’: a novel perspective on science-guided local adaptation.

We identify a set of essential recent advances in climate change research with high policy relevance, across natural and social sciences: (1) looming inevitability and implications of overshooting the 1.5°C warming limit, (2) urgent need for a rapid and managed fossil fuel phase-out, (3) challenges for scaling carbon dioxide removal, (4) uncertainties regarding the future contribution of natural carbon sinks, (5) intertwinedness of the crises of biodiversity loss and climate change, (6) compound events, (7) mountain glacier loss, (8) human immobility in the face of climate risks, (9) adaptation justice, and (10) just transitions in food systems.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Reports provides the scientific foundation for international climate negotiations and constitutes an unmatched resource for researchers. However, the assessment cycles take multiple years. As a contribution to cross- and interdisciplinary understanding of climate change across diverse research communities, we have streamlined an annual process to identify and synthesize significant research advances. We collected input from experts on various fields using an online questionnaire and prioritized a set of 10 key research insights with high policy relevance. This year, we focus on: (1) the looming overshoot of the 1.5°C warming limit, (2) the urgency of fossil fuel phase-out, (3) challenges to scale-up carbon dioxide removal, (4) uncertainties regarding future natural carbon sinks, (5) the need for joint governance of biodiversity loss and climate change, (6) advances in understanding compound events, (7) accelerated mountain glacier loss, (8) human immobility amidst climate risks, (9) adaptation justice, and (10) just transitions in food systems. We present a succinct account of these insights, reflect on their policy implications, and offer an integrated set of policy-relevant messages. This science synthesis and science communication effort is also the basis for a policy report contributing to elevate climate science every year in time for the United Nations Climate Change Conference.

We highlight recent and policy-relevant advances in climate change research – with input from more than 200 experts.

Globalisation has narrowed the gap between producers and consumers. Nations are increasingly relying on commodities produced outside of their borders for satisfying their consumption. This is particularly the case for the European Union (EU). This study assesses spillover effects, i.e. impacts taking place outside of the EU borders, resulting from the EU's demand for food products, in terms of environmental and social indicators.

Human demand for agri-food products contributes to environmental degradation in the form of land-use impacts and emissions into the atmosphere. Development and implementation of suitable policy instruments to mitigate these impacts requires robust and timely statistics at sectoral, regional and global levels. In this study, we aim to assess the environmental and social impacts embodied in European Union's (EU's) demand for agri-food products. To this end, we select a range of indicators: emissions (carbon dioxide, particulate matter, sulphur dioxide, nitrous oxide), land use, employment and income. We trace these environmental and social impacts across EU's trading partners to identify specific sectors and regions as hotspots of international spillovers embodied in EU's food supply chains and find that these hotspots are wide-ranging in all continents. EU's food demand is responsible for 5% of the EU's total CO2 consumption-based footprint, 9% of the total NOX footprint, 16% of the total PM footprint, 6% of the total SO2 footprint, 46% of the total land-use footprint, 13% of the total employment footprint and 5% of the total income footprint. Our results serve to inform future reforms in the EU for aligning policies and strategies with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the objectives of the Paris Climate Agreement.

Significant environmental and social spillover effects embodied in the EU's food supply chains.

Transformation of the world towards sustainability in line with the 2030 Agenda requires progress on multiple dimensions of human well-being. We track development of relevant indicators for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 1–7 against gross domestic product (GDP) per person in seven world regions and the world as a whole. Across the regions, we find uniform development patterns where SDGs 1–7 – and therefore main human needs – are achieved at around US$15,000 measured in 2011 US$ purchasing power parity (PPP).

How does GDP per person relate to the achievement of well-being as targeted by the 2030 Agenda? The 2030 Agenda includes global ambitions to meet human needs and aspirations. However, these need to be met within planetary boundaries. In nascent world-earth modelling, human well-being as well as global environmental impacts are linked through economic production, which is tracked by GDP. We examined historic developments on 5-year intervals, 1980–2015, between average income and the advancement on indicators of SDGs 1–7. This was done for both seven world regions and the world as a whole. We find uniform patterns of saturation for all regions above an income threshold somewhere around US$15,000 measured in 2011 US$ PPP. At this level, main human needs and capabilities are met. The level is also consistent with studies of life satisfaction and the Easterlin paradox. We observe stark differences with respect to scale: the patterns of the world as an aggregated whole develop differently from all its seven regions, with implications for world-earth model construction – and sustainability transformations.

Reaching human well-being #SDGs takes GDP levels of $15k. This may help shape transformation to a world that respects #PlanetaryBoundaries.

Charting robust pathways towards more sustainable futures that ‘leave no one behind’ requires that diverse communities engage in collective foresight and intelligence exercises to better understand global systemic challenges, anticipate the emerging risks and opportunities that disruptions present, and share perspectives on how to respond and inform decision-making. We report on the recent use of an international rapid foresight survey to assess expected societal trends over the next 3 years following the COVID-19 crisis. The results illustrate the power of collective foresight approaches to provide timely, nuanced insights for decision-making across sectors and scales, particularly in times of uncertainty.

We present the findings of a rapid foresight survey launched in spring 2020 to draw on the collective intelligence of the global community on where the world is headed post-COVID-19. Respondents were asked to (i) assess five key societal trends in the coming 3 years, (ii) provide news headlines they both expect and hope to see, and (iii) assess the role of digital technologies during crises. Analysis of over 2000 responses from more than 90 countries revealed important regional differences in expected societal trends related to sustainability. More respondents in the Global South expected shifts towards less inequality while more respondents in the Global North expected shifts towards a smaller ecological footprint. Qualitative analysis of proposed news headlines revealed four broad themes of focus (environment, equity, health, and economy), and yielded insights into perspectives on critical drivers of change. Finally, the survey report found that the vast majority of respondents were not opposed to digital surveillance in crises. In presenting these results, we explore the value of collective foresight and intelligence exercises in providing pluralistic inputs to decision-making and in complementing more prevalent methods of forecasting.

Collective foresight exercises with diverse communities can help chart robust pathways to more sustainable futures.

In this paper, we focus on the disruption that the current pandemic has created within the US industrial food system. We suggest that the pandemic has provided an opening for small producers. Attending to small-scale responses to the pandemic can guide policy and public investments towards a more just and sustainable future for food.

Building on the IPES-Food Communique of April 2020, we examine the many ways in which the US industrial food system faltered during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Using Regime Theory as a guide, we suggest that such a catastrophic crisis may create significant opportunities for an emergent food regime. Drawing from our research and participant observation in the US Midwest, we examine changes in the food system occasioned by the pandemic that foreshadow a new food regime. We suggest several blockages and risks to this new regime and suggest policies that would make transition smoother to a more just and sustainable food system.

What will food be like after the pandemic? This new study outlines an alternative food system emerging in the American Midwest.

This article takes stock of the 2030 Agenda and focuses on five governance areas. In a nutshell, we see a quite patchy and often primarily symbolic uptake of the global goals. Although some studies highlight individual success stories of actors and institutions to implement the goals, it remains unclear how such cases can be upscaled and develop a broader political impact to accelerate the global endeavor to achieve sustainable development. We hence raise concerns about the overall effectiveness of governance by goal-setting and raise the question of how we can make this mode of governance more effective.

A recent meta-analysis on the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has shown that these global goals are moving political processes forward only incrementally, with much variation across countries, sectors, and governance levels. Consequently, the realization of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development remains uncertain. Against this backdrop, this article explores where and how incremental political changes are taking place due to the SDGs, and under what conditions these developments can bolster sustainability transformations up to 2030 and beyond. Our scoping review builds upon an online expert survey directed at the scholarly community of the ‘Earth System Governance Project’ and structured dialogues within the ‘Taskforce on the SDGs’ under this project. We identified five governance areas where some effects of the SDGs have been observable: (1) global governance, (2) national policy integration, (3) subnational initiatives, (4) private governance, and (5) education and learning for sustainable development. This article delves deeper into these governance areas and draws lessons to guide empirical research on the promises and pitfalls of accelerating SDG implementation.

As SDG implementation lags behind, this article explores 5 governance areas asking how to strengthen the global goals.