Achieving the recommendations of the EAT-Lancet report for transition to the Planetary Health Diet (PHD) requires dramatic social, economic, and production transformations. These changes risk exacerbating gender inequalities throughout food systems, unless strategies to create a just transition for women and girls are similarly bold and transformative.
EAT-Lancet 2.0 places justice and power at the center of food system transformation. This commentary examines how concentrated corporate and financial power enables agri-food industries to externalize social, environmental, and health harms, and it highlights the structural reforms and collective action needed to rebalance power toward more just and sustainable food systems.
The latest EAT-Lancet Commission brings social justice more sharply into focus, raising concern over rising corporate concentration and the associated marketing of unhealthy foods. Here, we unpack mechanisms indulging corporate dominance and discuss how fiscal measures, with transparency and well-designed governance, can better align healthy diets with sustainability.
Anthropogenic mercury pollution persists as a threat to human health and the environment. Nearly a decade after the Minamata Convention on Mercury entered into force, diverse regulatory interventions have been widely implemented, yet the evolution of mercury flows across global value chains remains poorly understood because traditional source-siloed national inventories are not sufficient to capture cross-sectoral secondary emissions. Here, we developed a global mercury flow model to track spatiotemporal mercury flows across sectoral boundaries covering the complete mercury value chain. The results show that cumulative global emissions declined by approximately 556 (362–785) tonnes from 2017 to 2022, driven predominantly by upstream restrictions on mercury supply and use, together with synergistic effects from regional energy transitions, including coal phaseout. However, mercury captured by upstream end-of-pipe control measures was inadvertently re-emitted by the downstream waste disposal sector, partially offsetting emission reductions and revealing a critical blind spot in existing mercury regulations.
Recent breakthroughs in plant engineering enable crops to store unprecedented amounts of oil in their leaves and stems, not just in seeds. This innovation could revolutionize sustainable fuel production for aviation and shipping, sectors that cannot easily switch to electric power. By transforming high-yielding biomass crops into oil factories, we can meet renewable fuel standards while supporting rural economies and reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. Engineering crops to accumulate oil throughout vegetative portions of the plant addresses a critical gap in renewable energy production. This commentary integrates recent breakthroughs that overcome the limitations of traditional oil crops by combining genetic strategies with systems approaches to reach commercial viability. Our key message is as follows: engineered oil-producing crops can deliver beyond existing renewable fuels by simultaneously supporting industrial decarbonization and rural economic development and securing domestic supply chains that contribute to energy independence.
EAT-Lancet 2.0 makes the case that healthy and sustainable food systems must also be just. This Voices asks: what would it take to move from global targets to transformation pathways that are regionally grounded, politically feasible, and avoid deepening existing inequalities? Are there specific design principles, policy interventions, or research frontiers needed to support such a food-system transformation?
Industrial decarbonization is widely regarded as one of the most difficult and costly challenges, or “hard-to-abate,” in achieving net-zero emissions. Recently in Joule, Dai and colleagues demonstrated accelerated decarbonization pathways at lower costs for China’s industrial sector. Here, we argue that coordinated, system-wide transitions can accelerate learning, lower costs, strengthen competitiveness, and offer implications for global industrial decarbonization.
Soil health is essential for plant productivity and sustainable ecosystem development and is especially critical for drylands, which support over one-third of the world’s population. However, a comprehensive framework for evaluating soil health in drylands within the broader context of ecosystem services is still lacking. Here, we surveyed 265 dryland farmlands along a 3,800-km aridity gradient in northwestern China and assessed soil health by categorizing 44 soil indicators into ecosystem services of food production, water quality, human health, and climate regulation. Our soil health index positively correlated with primary productivity, verified by two greenhouse experiments, and outperformed existing models. Biological indicators, particularly soil microorganisms, played a crucial role, explaining 62.57% of the variation in soil health. However, increased agricultural management intensity was significantly negative associated with soil health. Our study advances ecosystem services-based soil health assessment, emphasizing management that fosters microbial diversity to ensure agricultural sustainability in arid regions.
Net-zero and circularity are vital to the chemical industry’s sustainability. Recently in Chem Circularity, Nabera et al. introduced an “emissions circularity degree” to quantify circular-enabled emission reduction potential. Here, we underscore the need for circularity metrics and distinguish material circularity, carbon circularity, and net-zero emissions as distinct yet interconnected pillars for a sustainable chemical industry.
Protein is essential to human health, but current supply remains dominated by animal-based sources, with substantial environmental and social costs. Supported by rapid biotechnology advances, microbial foods, from edible microbial biomass to fermentation-derived ingredients, are emerging as a sustainable, circular-driven alternative. However, real-world viability depends not only on technical feasibility but also on the extent to which sustainability is embedded into scalable routes. In this review, we mapped four decision layers shaping performance and footprint at scale. Core barriers arise from diverse but interconnected dimensions, including difficult-to-source and standardized feedstocks, fragile strains with weak food-grade specification control, limited engineering tractability of non-model organisms, energy- and cost-intensive downstream processing, and constrained valorization of residual streams under safety and regulatory rules. Overcoming these barriers will not be enough for a circular protein economy toward sustainable nutrition unless consumer acceptance, performance in real food matrices, and fit-for-purpose governance are addressed together.
Anthropogenic climate warming is anticipated to intensify heatwaves worldwide, posing growing risks to society and ecosystems. Yet the impacts of oceanic heatwaves (OHWs) on continental heatwaves (CHWs) remain insufficiently understood. This lack of understanding hinders the accurate prediction and effective mitigation of heatwave disasters. Here, we employ a Lagrangian tracking method and reveal that 22% of CHWs can be attributed to OHWs, 43% of heatwaves occurring in coastal regions globally can be ascribed to OHWs. We show that anthropogenic greenhouse forcing has increased the likelihood of landfalling OHWs by a factor of nine. Notably, under the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP)245 (SSP370) scenario, limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C rather than 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels could avoid 17% (20%) landfalling OHW exposure, safeguard 21% (32%) of the population, and preserve 36% (42%) of economic status. Our findings underscore the significant role of OHWs in contributing to CHWs and emphasize the urgent benefits of stringent climate targets.
Wetlands are among the greatest natural carbon sink and methane source environments on Earth. Hence, accurate knowledge of wetland greenhouse gas (GHG) fluxes is critical for understanding global GHG balances and their dynamics. Our ability to understand present and future wetland GHG fluxes depends on systematic in situ flux data suitable for model validation. Such data, in turn, depend on the available flux measurement methods and their strengths, weaknesses, and availability based on cost and ease of use. In this Primer, we highlight the importance of measurement methods in advancing our knowledge on wetland GHG fluxes. Processes and concepts related to wetland GHG fluxes are introduced along with examples of established and emergent methods including their operating principles, benefits, and challenges. One aim is to inspire interest in developing our shared method toolbox to facilitate quantification and prediction of the GHG fluxes that will shape the future.
Dr. Musonda Mumba, a Zambian national, is the secretary general of the Convention on Wetlands. She holds a PhD in wetland hydrology and conservation from University College London and brings over 25 years of experience in environmental management and sustainable development. Before joining the Convention, she served as the director for the Rome Centre for Sustainable Development in Rome, Italy, with UNDP and spent 12 years at the UN Environment Programme, including as head of the Terrestrial Ecosystems Programme. She is the founder of the Network of African Women Environmentalists and has been named one of the 100 most influential African women. Dr. Mumba's views are her own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Secretariat of the Convention on Wetlands.
Bioenergy production is expected to grow significantly under ambitious emission-reduction scenarios, but its expansion may conflict with food security and environmental goals, raising major sustainability concerns. Robust estimates of sustainable bioenergy potential are needed to guide land-use planning. Yet current global assessments do not jointly evaluate food security, biodiversity, and ecosystem carbon storage constraints at fine spatial resolution. Here, we map the global sustainable potential of bioenergy production from dedicated energy crops at 5 arc-min resolution, using land prices as a proxy for food-related opportunity cost together with biodiversity and ecosystem carbon storage criteria. We apply a quantile-based approach to ensure joint compliance with these economic and environmental constraints. At the 30% compliance threshold, eligible land ranges from 158 to 222 Mha, corresponding to 33-46 EJ year(-1). These results lie at the lower end of previous estimates, narrowing the plausible contribution of bioenergy crops to the energy transition.
The Strait of Hormuz closure intensifies natural-gas-related energy risks for Europe, triggering a new set of energy trilemmas. By contemplating several scenarios, we argue that natural-gas supplier diversification after the 2022 energy crisis is unlikely to resolve underlying energy-system vulnerability, whereas structural shifts toward renewables is crucial.
Current bottom-up estimates of wetland methane emissions exhibit significant uncertainties, a major source of which is the overlooked methane emissions from unsaturated soils. We therefore propose replacing the traditional “wet-or-dry” paradigm with a dynamic water-table-based framework.
Climate change is intensifying wetland methane emissions, reinforcing a feedback loop that accelerates warming and threatens wetlands’ role as natural climate solutions. We propose climate-smart interventions for wetland protection, restoration, and management that explicitly account for methane dynamics. Targeted interventions can weaken methane feedback while safeguarding ecological functions and services.
Chemically complex wastewater is increasingly costly and risky to treat off-site, creating an urgent need for on-site oxidation technologies. Fenton and Fenton-like chemistry is attractive for pollutant degradation, but its efficiency is constrained by the short lifetime and limited diffusion distance of hydroxyl radicals (·OH), causing excessive oxidant consumption. How to stabilize transient ·OH for sustained radical utilization remains unclear. Here, we construct isolated Fe–O4 single-atom sites inside zeolite micropores through in-pore ferrocene cracking and atomic trapping. The nanoconfined tetrahedral oxygen microenvironment lowers hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) activation barriers, enables reversible Fe redox cycling, and stabilizes adsorbed ·OH through orbital hybridization. This catalyst extends the effective ·OH lifetime by 30-fold and sustains radical production for 24 h. Integrated into a portable device, it achieves >98% contaminant removal over multiple operating cycles and purifies diverse wastewater, with an estimated 5-fold lower cost than conventional Fenton. The nanoconfined single-atom platforms offer a versatile and scalable strategy for on-site water purification.
Sustainable procurement is a critical leverage point for reducing the climate and biodiversity impacts of bio-based supply chains. Yet companies often lack rapid, batch-level data linking biomass origin and quality to environmental footprints and costs. Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) with chemometrics is a rapid, non-destructive method commonly used to assess bio-based product quality and geographical origin. Here, we show how NIRS-based origin identification can be combined with spatially explicit life-cycle assessment to derive environmental footprints of bio-based supply chains. Using a Dutch feed production case study, we integrate the derived environmental footprints with quality measurements and ingredient-specific cost estimates to optimize across these indicators. We show that a balance can be struck where feed quality can be maintained with a minimal increase in costs (0.1%–1.0%) and a substantial reduction in climate (4.2%–9.5%) and land-based biodiversity (44.2%–50.3%) footprints. Together, these results show that routinely collected spectral data can support more actionable environmental footprinting in biomass procurement while explicitly balancing product quality, cost, climate impacts, and biodiversity impacts.
Groundwater stress has become a significant constraint on sustainable development. In China, various adaptation measures have been implemented, such as water withdrawal restriction, inter-basin water transfer, and unconventional water resources utilization, yet their effectiveness in alleviating future groundwater stress remains unclear. Here, we combine survey data and large-scale hydrological projections and reveal that increased non-agricultural water withdrawal will aggravate future groundwater stress in China when adaptation measures are neglected, with the population exposed to severe groundwater stress rising from 23.1% (22.3%–23.9%) currently to 30.9% (29.9%–33.0%) by 2050. While existing measures may mitigate some future stress, 19.3% (17.1%–21.4%) of the nationwide population will still face severe risk. We demonstrate that the synergistic effects of adaptation solutions exceed their individual effects, and only more stringent water withdrawal management combined with enhanced water supply can substantially alleviate future groundwater stress. Our findings provide essential insights and solutions for regional groundwater security and achieving Sustainable Development Goals.
