This review aimed to (i) synthesise evidence of the impact of publicly procured school meals programmes on nutritional outcomes of children/adolescents (5–18 years) in sub-Saharan Africa and (ii) identify challenges and facilitators to implementing effective school meals programmes.

Mixed-methods systematic review (n 7 databases). Nutritional outcomes assessed were anthropometrics (underweight, stunting, wasting, overweight/obesity), micronutrient deficiencies, food consumed and food environment. Qualitative findings were coded using a nine-step school food system framework: production of food, wholesale and trading, transportation and storage, processing and distribution, food preparation, distribution to students, student stakeholders, community involvement and infrastructure support.

Sub-Saharan Africa.

Children/adolescents (5–18 years), parents, school personnel and government officials.

Thirty-three studies (twenty-six qualitative, seven quantitative) from nine sub-Saharan African countries were included. Six studies found a positive impact of publicly procured school meals programmes on nutritional outcomes (wasting (n 1), stunting (n 3), underweight (n 1), vitamin A intake (n 1) and dietary diversity (n 1)). Fifty-three implementation challenges were identified, particularly during food preparation (e.g. training, payment), distribution to students (e.g. meal quantity/quality/diversity, utensils) and infrastructure support (e.g. funding, monitoring, coordination). Implementation facilitators were identified (n 37) across processing and distribution (e.g. programme coordination), student stakeholders (e.g. food preferences, reduced stigma) and community involvement (e.g. engagement, positive perceptions). Included policy recommendations targeted wholesale and trading, food preparation, student stakeholders and infrastructure support in nine, fifteen and twenty-five studies, respectively.

As many challenges remain, strengthening implementation (and therefore the nutritional impact) of school meals programmes in sub-Saharan Africa requires bold commitment and improved coordination at multiple levels of governance.

The Anthropocene era demands urgent societal changes as we exceed planetary limits. Addressing key sustainability and governance challenges requires inter- and transdisciplinary approaches. Future Earth, a global initiative, brings together leading scholars to advance sustainability science by connecting natural and social sciences and humanities with policymaking. This Special Collection emerged from a 2021 call by Future Earth. Featuring 12 manuscripts, it explores themes like cutting-edge sustainability knowledge, interdisciplinary methods, cultural and developmental issues, and strategies for sustainable transformations. This collection offers a forward-looking view on critical research to guide policy and funding for a sustainable world.

The Anthropocene era necessitates urgent societal changes as we surpass planetary boundaries. Addressing the pressing questions of biogeochemical monitoring, feedback mechanisms, and effective governance systems requires interdisciplinary approaches. Future Earth, a global initiative formed by consolidating networks from major research programs, has been pivotal in advancing sustainability science through such approaches. By bridging natural and social sciences and humanities for enhancing the science–policy interface, Future Earth fosters research and innovation essential for global sustainability transformations. This Special Collection, ‘Charting the Course for the Next Decade of Sustainability Research and Innovation,’ arose from a 2021 call by Future Earth. The Special Collection highlights key scientific questions and future research directions. Contributions span themes such as state-of-the-art sustainability knowledge, transdisciplinary methods, cultural and developmental tensions, multi-actor process efficacy, and integrated knowledge for sustainable transformations. With manuscripts sourced from Future Earth's Global Research Networks and other aligned organizations, this issue underscores a forward-looking perspective on critical interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research needed to support high-level policy and funding directions, ultimately aiming to inform societal decisions for a sustainable and equitable world. We conclude that addressing the sustainability crisis requires a diverse and multi-faceted approach that draws upon the best knowledge of humankind.

Explore urgent societal changes and sustainability science with Future Earth's Collection on sustainability research.

This commentary argues that the current academic and societal pursuit of ‘solutions’ to sustainability challenges fails to acknowledge how change normally occurs in complex adaptive systems, that is, socio-economic systems and the Earth system, relevant for societal development. Such systems seldom evolve through isolated changes or ‘solutions’ but, rather, through numerous small adjustments of component parts. It is the interactions between these small adjustments that lead to system change. Thus, we argue the need for altered expectations in relation to, and a new narrative describing, the anticipated role of research in the pursuit of a more sustainable societal development trajectory.

The commentary argues for seeking multiple adjustments rather than seeking ‘solutions’ to our current planetary crises. Based on the belief that many of these adjustments may already lie dormant across academic departments, the University of Copenhagen conducted a series of ‘Transformation Labs’ in 2023 with the purpose of identifying the potential socio-economic and technical adjustments that, in combination, may catalyze societal transformation toward sustainability as well as potential barriers for their societal implementation. Here, we reflect on the learnings from the exercise and argue that both current funding practices and university training should be modified to support this altered narrative. In addition, interactions between research institutions and the beyond-academic world should be strengthened.

For reaching a sustainable trajectory, research needs to focus on multiple adjustments rather than fixed solutions.

There is abundant research about the impacts that large-scale mining produces on territories to the detriment of their social and environmental sustainability. However, during our research in Chile and Peru, we also identified local transformative initiatives that pursue sustainable development by proposing alternatives to how the socio-ecological impacts of natural resource extraction are produced and distributed throughout society. Specifically, we ask the question: How do local communities in Chile and Peru that are affected by mining activities engage in community-based environmental monitoring (CBEM)?

By examining how local communities in Chile and Peru engage in community environmental monitoring, this paper argues that local political organisation and institutional innovations are crucial for the emergence of transformations towards sustainability. Local political organisation and mobilisation can create a window of opportunity for discussion about extractive activities and their impacts, as well as possible proposals for alternatives. Institutional innovations triggered by local political work can lead to the implementation of such initiatives. Our findings are based on qualitative case studies of CBEM in Chile and Peru, in areas with high levels of environmental degradation due to mining. In Chile we analysed a case of community air monitoring in a copper processing area, and in Peru a case of community water monitoring in a mining area. Drawing on debates on social transformation and political ecology theory, this study aims to show CBEM promotes changes towards a more democratic and preventive environmental governance, and encourages the recognition of environmental injustices.

This paper analyses how local communities in Chile and Peru engage in community environmental monitoring in areas affected by the presence of extractive industries. We identified local transformative initiatives that pursue sustainable development by proposing alternatives to how the socio-environmental impacts of natural resource extraction are produced and distributed in society. Our findings are based on qualitative case studies of community-based air and water monitoring in extractive areas in Chile and Peru.

Healthcare systems significantly impact the environment, which in turn affects human health. To address this, we propose to revise a popular framework for healthcare improvement, by introducing the advancement of planetary health (the health of both humans and the natural systems) among the aims that health systems should pursue. This approach suggests reducing medical service needs through disease prevention, minimizing environmental impacts, and supporting global efforts to protect planetary health. Practical applications to bring about these pathways are documented in the literature.

Restoring the health of the planet, with concurrent benefits for human civilization, is paramount. Healthcare systems play a crucial role in this regard, considering the environmental impact of health services. Widely recognized approaches to designing healthcare systems for the optimization of their performance are based on the pursuit of multiple aims, such as the Triple Aim and Quadruple Aim frameworks. The objective of this work is to revise the latter by substituting ‘Advance Planetary Health’ for ‘Improve Population Health’.

The objective of advancing planetary health supports all other pre-existing objectives: lowering costs, enhancing patient experience, team wellbeing, and population health, which directly relates to planetary health. Health systems promoting planetary health reduce the need for medical services through disease prevention and health promotion, pursue the provision of appropriate care, minimize the overall environmental impact of medical services, and support planetary health initiatives across all sectors and society. Multiple interconnected pathways exist to operationalize the above components.

A revised quadruple aim for healthcare improvement, aligned with social and economic goals of sustainable prosperity and wellbeing, may be a desirable step toward constructing planetary health systems capable of maximizing the health of humans and natural systems.

It's time for new ‘planetary health systems’: focusing on planetary health to enhance healthcare performance. #PlanetaryHealth #ClimateCrisis #HealthcareImprovement.

This article examines the challenges and opportunities to integrate diverse sources of evidence in assessments produced by international platforms working at the science–policy interface. Diversity (or pluralism) of sources of literature, both in terms of their geographic origin and disciplinary focus, is essential for assessments to inform decision-making across social–ecological contexts. Using the recently completed ‘Methodological Assessment of the Diverse Values and Valuation of Nature’ of the Intergovernmental Science–Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services as a case, we find that significant effort has been dedicated to reviewing diverse literature. We discuss three strategies to expand pluralism in future assessments.

Representing plural views in science–policy platforms is essential to avoid reproducing geographic and epistemic biases that permeate contemporary scientific knowledge production and synthesis. The Intergovernmental Science–Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) has strived to produce assessments that incorporate information from diverse regions and knowledge systems. We explore the geographic and epistemic pluralism of the literature included in the ‘Methodological Assessment of the Diverse Values and Valuation of Nature’ (VA), and the challenges and opportunities to achieve such knowledge pluralism. We applied a bibliometric analysis to the sources of evidence cited in the VA, and reflected on the assessment development process, in which we were directly involved. Our results highlight the success of different strategies developed by VA experts to engage with diverse sources of literature. Still, most evidence was English-language academic literature produced in Western Europe, Canada, and the United States, echoing the prominence of this literature in scientific publication in environmental disciplines. Reflecting on our experiences, we discuss strategies that could further enhance the geographic and epistemic pluralism in the information reviewed for future environmental assessments produced by IPBES and other international science–policy platforms.

Epistemic and geographic pluralism was partially achieved in IPBES Values Assessment, and can be further enhanced in future assessments.

Agriculture has been dominated by annual plants, such as all cereals and oilseeds, since the very beginning of civilization over 10,000 years ago. Annual plants are planted and uprooted every year which results in severe disturbance of the soil and disrupts ecosystem services. Science has shown that it is possible to domesticate completely new perennial grain crops, i.e. planted once and harvested year after year. Such crops would solve many of the problems of agriculture, but their development and uptake would be at odds with the current agricultural technology industry.

Agriculture is arguably the most environmentally destructive innovation in human history. A root cause is the reliance on annual crops requiring uprooting and restarting every season. Most environmental predicaments of agriculture can be attributed to the use of annuals, as well as many social, political, and economic ones. Advances in domestication and breeding of novel perennial grain crops have demonstrated the possibility of a future agricultural shift from annual to perennial crops. Such a change could have many advantages over the current agricultural systems which are to over 80% based on annual crops mainly grown in monocultures. We analyze and review the prospects for such scientific advances to be adopted and scaled to a level where it is pertinent to talk about a perennial revolution. We follow the logic of E.O. Wright's approach of Envisioning Real Utopias by discussing the desirability, viability, and achievability of such a transition. Proceeding from Lakatos' theory of science and Lukes' three dimensions of power, we discuss the obstacles to such a transition. We apply a transition theory lens to formulate four reasons of optimism that a perennial revolution could be imminent within 3–5 decades and conclude with an invitation for research.

Systemic risks such as climate change and pandemics are complex and interconnected. Managing such risks requires effective organisational structures and processes. This publication presents conceptually robust, evidence-based approaches for assessing and managing systemic risks.

Systemic risks originate and evolve in the nexus of tightly coupled dynamic systems, which are a characteristic of modern societies in the Anthropocene. Systemic risk implies the breakdown of a system which provides essential functions to society. Connectivity between systems is a key enabler for systemic risk to manifest through cascading effects. Thus, systemic risks originate and evolve in the nexus of tightly coupled dynamic systems. Cascading effects and the convergence of systemic risks with conventional risks as well as other systemic risks challenge the established modes of risk governance that still rest to a large extent on differentiation and compartmentalisation. Thus, governance of systemic risks requires an integrative approach towards risk governance that combines interdisciplinary risk analysis with iterative, adaptive and inclusive governance procedures. By drawing on the case studies of the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change, this paper proposes an innovative risk governance framework for systemic risks based on the integration of systems analysis and a governance procedure with the salient features of reflection, iteration, inclusion, transparency and accountability.

Systemic risks highlight the interconnected nature of our contemporary societies which calls for tailored responses.

Neoclassical economics (NCE) theory and neoliberal economics practice together form one of the principal driving forces of environmental destruction and social injustice. We critically examine ten key hypotheses that form the foundations of NCE, and four other claims. Each fails to satisfy one or more of the basic requirements of scientific practice. Hence, NCE is fundamentally flawed, is irrational in the common meaning of the word, and should not be used as a guide for government policies. Because NCE is socially constructed, it can be replaced with an interdisciplinary conceptual framework that is compatible with ecological sustainability and social justice.

Neoclassical economics (NCE) is widely regarded as providing theoretical justification for neoliberal notions such as ‘governments should minimize regulation and spending, and hence leave major socioeconomic and environmental decisions to the market’. A large body of literature finds that NCE is largely responsible for environmental destruction and social inequality. As NCE is claimed to be a science and has appropriated terminology (without the content) from physics, we examine critically its basic hypotheses and four other claims from a viewpoint of natural scientists and an ecological economist, each a sustainability researcher. This paper defines NCE in two ways: as a theoretical structure for economics based on (1) the hypotheses of methodological individualism, methodological instrumentalism and methodological equilibration, and (2) the three hypotheses named above together with seven other common hypotheses of NCE. We find that each hypothesis and claim fails to satisfy one or more basic requirements of scientific practice such as empirical confirmation, underlying credible or empirical assumptions, consistency with Earth system science, and internal consistency. Sensitivity analysis is rare and ability to predict is lacking. Therefore, we recommend that neoclassical microeconomics be reformed and neoclassical macroeconomics be abandoned and replaced with a transdisciplinary field such as social ecological economics.

Conventional economics, a driver of environmental damage and social inequality, fails examination by sustainability scientists.

Substantive carbon is sequestered in mangrove, saltmarsh, seagrass, and other marine ecosystems. Blue carbon is considered to offer potential for enhanced carbon sequestration. Bringing blue carbon to market, however, presents risks to local people and communities with livelihood and other connections to these environments. While efforts are forged to establish payments for ecosystem services, blue carbon presents critical challenges to social and environmental justice. In this paper, we synthesize insights from relevant literature and provide direction for future research on the social and cultural dimensions of blue carbon.

Blue carbon has been proposed as a nature-based solution to mitigate climate change and is the focus of concerted scientific and policy attention. The rush to operationalize blue carbon however, presents significant risks for social and environmental justice where it intersects with inequality and marginalization. To date, the reasonable and just consequences of the social transformation that will accompany blue carbon are under-examined. We undertake a structured literature review of research published over the past decade that addresses the social and cultural dimensions of blue carbon, and chart four themes: (1) conceptual issues, (2) governance issues; (3) emergent lessons (from practice); and (4) future research directions that address: social acceptability; processes to address social justice including engagement, participation, and benefit sharing; information and data deficits; and institutional governance reform. If the stated opportunities are to be fully realized, we argue the social and cultural dimensions of blue carbon, and its intersections with social justice, must be attended to explicitly and clarified.

Just transitions to climate change mean attending to people, culture, and livelihoods as blue carbon is operationalized.

Several countries are currently revising or have already revised their mental health laws to align with the global movement to reduce the use of coercive care. No government has yet fully implemented the recommendation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) to eliminate the use of coercion in mental healthcare. Consequently, the international field of mental health law and policy is in a degree of flux.

To describe the rationale, development and protocol for a project that will map and examine how mental health laws, policies and service capacity across European countries relate to the use of coercive measures, including involuntary admissions and treatment, restraints and seclusion. This will help to better understand the current situation and explore future directions of policies regarding coercive care.

The project is being carried out under the purview of the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) action network, entitled FOSTREN (Fostering and Strengthening Approaches to Reducing Coercion in European Mental Health Services). A multidisciplinary group of experts developed a comprehensive survey assessing mental health laws, policies and service frameworks, based on World Health Organization and UNCRPD recommendations. The survey was piloted in three countries, revised and disseminated to 30 FOSTREN country representatives. The survey will provide data for three strands of work on legislation, policies and service-level context. A comprehensive evaluation will be conducted, drawing on findings from all work packages.

The project could inform the development of strategies, interventions and legislation to address gaps and promote compliance with international standards.

Enabling local adoption of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) is important to accelerate global efforts to achieve sustainable development. However, local governments have plural perspectives on how to engage with the SDGs. In this paper, we identify three perspectives on how to enable local SDGs based on cases of nine local governments in Australia. We emphasize the need for seeing local SDG adoption as contextualized and actor-driven processes.

Local governments worldwide are taking the initiative to engage with sustainable development goals (SDGs) despite the absence of a globally coordinated guideline on local SDGs actions. With less than a decade until its 2030 deadline, a more targeted and nuanced approach to enabling local SDG actions is needed. In this paper, we argue that there is a need to look at local SDG actions as an actor-driven process where agency, contexts, purpose, and dynamics co-evolve and shape the outcome of the process. Using Q-methodology, we explore different perspectives on what enables local SDGs actions in nine local governments in Australia. Three perspectives in enabling local SDG actions emerged from the study: (1) ‘Enablers should support institutional embeddedness of the SDGs’, (2) ‘Enablers should support stakeholder coordination for the SDGs’, and (3) ‘Enablers should support community engagement for the SDGs’. Each perspective has preferred enablers, contextualized within certain ways of engaging with the SDGs, certain views of the SDGs, and specific local contexts and capacities. This study provides insights to contextualize knowledge in current literature to enable local SDG actions.

Many understand that the local adoption of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) is not a one-shoe-fits-all process, but what are some of the plurality in local SDG adoptions? In this paper, we identify three perspectives on enabling the SDGs based on nine local governments in Australia.

To address increasingly pressing social–environmental challenges, the transformative strand of sustainability science seeks to move beyond a descriptive-analytical stance in order to explore and contribute to the implementation of radical alternatives to dominant and unsustainable paradigms, norms, and values. However, in many cases, academia is not currently structured to support and reward inter-/trans-disciplinary and transformative endeavors. This paper introduces a theory of change for the Future Earth Pathways Initiative, and similar initiatives, to help leverage the capacity of sustainability scientists to engage in transformative research.

The increasing body of descriptive-analytical knowledge produced by sustainability science over the last two decades has largely failed to trigger the transformation of policies, norms, and behaviors it was aiming to inform. The emergent transformative strand of sustainability science is a proactive alternative approach seeking to play an active role in processes of societal change by developing knowledge about options, solutions, and pathways, and by participating in their implementation. In principle, scientists can enhance their contribution to more sustainable futures by engaging in transformative research. However, a lack of skills and competencies, relatively unmatured transformative methods and concepts, and an institutional landscape still geared toward disciplinary and descriptive-analytical research, still hinders the sustainability science community from engaging more widely in transformative research. In this paper, the Future Earth Pathways Initiative introduces a theory of change (ToC) for increasing the capacity of sustainability scientists to engage in this type of research. This ToC ultimately aims to build a growing community of practitioners engaged in transformative research, to advance concepts, methods, and paradigms to foster ‘fit-for-purpose transformative research’, and to shape institutions to nurture transformative research-friendly contexts.

What would a theory of change for leveraging the transformative capacity of sustainability science look like?

Many of the most pressing issues of today, such as climate change, habitat destruction, and conflict, are linked to our growing economies and the increasing amount of natural resources needed to maintain them. Current resource management policies focus on using resources more efficiently while maintaining economic growth. However, these policies have been insufficient and alternatives are needed. Resource caps are one such alternative which would directly limit resource consumption and extraction. This first review on the topic covers existing research on resource caps, the practical issues of implementation, and suggests a way forward for future policy and research.

Increasingly unsustainable rates of resource consumption and extraction have led to a growing discussion among researchers and environmental advocates on introducing caps on resource use. Research suggests that a reliance on efficiency-based approaches and a focus on decoupling are not sufficient to reduce ecosystem pressures, and instead alternatives such as resource caps may be needed. This article therefore provides the first comprehensive review of research on resource caps, linking them to major social science debates on resource scarcity, social metabolism, decoupling, and degrowth. Resource caps have been increasingly proposed in contemporary degrowth research, but this review found that resource caps are compatible with the agendas of those who endorse ‘green growth’ or ‘ecomodernist’ positions. Although resource caps are commonly proposed at a global level, it was found that enacting national or regional level caps is more viable, and that such caps should be developed through post-normal science and with democratic governance. However, current research does not show how resource caps can be implemented in practice, despite there being a detailed discussion on the political and social factors surrounding implementation. Future research will need to consider how, and even if, caps can function, and in what situations they are effective.

Capping consumption and extraction of natural resources is an alternative to current efficiency-based resource policies.

Engaging with economic questions is crucial for sustainability science to maintain its transformative potential. By recognizing the impact of continuous economic growth on environmental problems, the concept of degrowth proposes a practical approach to achieving sustainability. It urges experts in sustainability to think carefully about the impacts of economic growth, echoing recent scientific findings that question the need for endless growth. Therefore, this article highlights the potential of degrowth as a transformative approach that can expand capacities necessary for socio-ecological sustainability.

This article highlights the potential of degrowth as a transformative approach that can expand capacities necessary for socio-ecological sustainability. By addressing economic growth as a fundamental driver of unsustainability, degrowth offers a concrete pathway toward achieving sustainable outcomes. It calls for sustainability scientists to explicitly consider the role of economic growth, aligning with recent scientific assessments that support a critical stance on growth. Although degrowth and sustainability share common goals such as respecting biocapacity and equitable distribution of ecological budgets, degrowth approaches differ by placing emphasis on national and local solutions and exploring aspects such as technology, time, work, commodity, and property. Engaging with economic questions is crucial for sustainability science to maintain its transformative potential. Growth-critical perspectives such as degrowth and post-growth have the potential to propel sustainability discourses into new, more impactful realms of development.

Engaging with economic questions is crucial for sustainability science to maintain its transformative potential. Degrowth proposes a practical approach for achieving sustainability.

Human societies are changing where and how water flows through the atmosphere. However, these changes in the atmospheric water cycle are not being managed, nor is there any real sense of where these changes might be headed in the future. Thus, we develop a new economic theory of atmospheric water management, and explore this theory using creative story-based scenarios. These scenarios reveal surprising possibilities for the future of atmospheric water management, ranging from a stock market for transpiration to on-demand weather. We discuss these story-based futures in the context of research and policy priorities in the present day.

Humanity is modifying the atmospheric water cycle, via land use, climate change, air pollution, and weather modification. Historically, atmospheric water was implicitly considered a ‘public good’ since it was neither actively consumed nor controlled. However, given anthropogenic changes, atmospheric water can become a ‘common-pool’ good (consumable) or a ‘club’ good (controllable). Moreover, advancements in weather modification presage water becoming a ‘private’ good, meaning both consumable and controllable. Given the implications, we designed a theoretical framing of atmospheric water as an economic good and used a combination of methods in order to explore possible future scenarios based on human modifications of the atmospheric water cycle. First, a systematic literature search of scholarly abstracts was used in a computational text analysis. Second, the output of the text analysis was matched to different parts of an existing economic goods framework. Then, a group of global water experts were trained and developed story-based scenarios. The resultant scenarios serve as creative investigations of the future of human modification of the atmospheric water cycle. We discuss how the scenarios can enhance anticipatory capacity in the context of both future research frontiers and potential policy pathways including transboundary governance, finance, and resource management.

Story-based scenarios reveal novel future pathways for the management of the atmospheric water cycle.

Powerful influences on societal knowledge, values, and behavior, artificial intelligence-infused media systems, new and old, currently reinforce the interlinked problems of inequality and unsustainable consumption. This problem is rarely discussed in environmental research and policy, and even less so how it might be overcome. Discussing this consequential blind spot and the power structures that underpin it, this article argues that sustainability researchers should centrally explore the need and possibilities for democratic reconfiguration of the political economies and charters of media systems to achieve sustainability and other broad, inclusive public goals.

Powerful influences on societal knowledge, values and behavior, artificial intelligence-infused media systems, new and old, currently tend to reinforce the interlinked problems of inequality and unsustainable consumption. This problem is rarely discussed in environmental research and policy, and even less so how it might be overcome. Discussing this consequential blind spot and the power structures that underpin it, this article argues that sustainability researchers should centrally explore the possibilities for democratic governance and reconfiguration of the political economies of media systems to foster human wellbeing and just transformations toward sustainability.

Sustainability transformations require ‘signification steering’ and interventions in media systems' configurations.