Publications

Loan Diep, Timon McPhearson. 2025. Empowering cities globally: Four levers for transformative urban adaptation with nature-based solutions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2315912121

The latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change showed that upcoming decades are likely to be accompanied with an increase in climate impacts in urban areas, thereby stressing the need for empowering cities to help them address the challenges ahead by closing the urban adaptation gap. The lock-in systems in which cities are often trapped create resistance to change and leads to missed opportunities to cocrea...

Timon McPhearson, Niki Frantzeskaki, Alessandro Ossola, Loan Diep, Pippin M. L. Anderson, Timothy Blatch, Marcus J. Collier, Elizabeth M. Cook, Christina Culwick Fatti, Zbigniew J. Grabowski, Nancy B. Grimm, Dagmar Haase, Pablo Herreros-Cantis, Jessica Kavonic, Brenda B. Lin, Duván H. Lopez Meneses, A. Marissa Matsler, Magnus Moglia, Jordi Morató, Patrick O’Farrell, Parama Roy, Chandni Singh, Jing Wang, Weiqi Zhou. 2025. Global synthesis and regional insights for mainstreaming urban nature-based solutions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2315910121

Nature-based solutions (NbS) have emerged as a key strategy for sustainably addressing multiple urban challenges, with rapidly increasing knowledge production requiring synthesis to better understand whether and how NbS work in different social, ecological, economic, or governance contexts. Insights in this Perspective are drawn from a thematic review of 61 NbS review articles supported by an expert assessment of NbS knowledge...

Niki Frantzeskaki, Katinka Wijsman, Nadja Kabisch, Timon McPhearson. 2025. Inter- and transdisciplinary knowledge is critical for nature-based solutions to contribute to just urban transformations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2315911121

Nature-based solutions (NBS) are used to transform existing unsustainable and undesirable path dependencies in cities. For NBS to contribute to just urban transformations, a stronger inter- and transdisciplinary knowledge base is needed. This knowledge base is essential to engage with six complex yet crucial questions about NBS, including “for what?,” “which nature?,” “where?,” “how?,” “when,” and “for whom?.” To address these...

Shiwei Liu, Cunde Xiao, David E. Robertson, Bo Su, Yi Huang, Tianye Wang, Xiaoming Wang. 2025. An enhanced Budyko-based water balance model simulating monthly runoff in headwater catchments of the Tarim River Basin. Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejrh.2025.102576

Climate warming is rapidly retreating the cryosphere, increasing water yield variability in high mountain catchments and challenging downstream water management. A deeper understanding of water resources involving quantifying runoff components, is crucial for effective adaptation strategies in high mountain catchments. However, data scarcity limits the application of complex physically-based models in high mountain areas. To a...

Louis Delannoy, Alexandre Verzier, Bernardo A. Bastien-Olvera, Felipe Benra, Magnus Nyström, Peter Søgaard Jørgensen. 2025. Dynamics of the polycrisis: temporal trends, spatial distribution, and co-occurrences of national shocks (1970–2019). Global Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2025.10008

In response to the concerns of a growing number of crises, we trace the temporal trends, distribution, and co-occurrences of shocks – sudden events with noticeable impacts – on 175 countries from 1970 to 2019. Our analysis shows that shocks have not evolved uniformly over time and space: after becoming more co-occurring between 1970 and 2000, they then showed a regionally dependent shift in patterns. Our results highlight that...

Erle C. Ellis, Yadvinder Malhi, Hannah Ritchie, Jasper Montana, Sandra Díaz, David Obura, Susan Clayton, Melissa Leach, Laura Pereira, Emma Marris, Michael Muthukrishna, Bojie Fu, Peter Frankopan, Molly K. Grace, Samira Barzin, Krushil Watene, Nicholas Depsky, Josefin Pasanen, Pedro Conceição. 2025. An aspirational approach to planetary futures. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09080-1

Prevailing frameworks to address planetary environmental challenges tend to focus on setting goals, targets, or boundaries to limit human harm to ecosystems or species. Here we propose an aspirational approach aimed at empowering people to shape a better future for all of life on Earth. We do this by building on the human development approach and its supporting metrics, especially the Human Development Index (HDI), a broadly i...

Sana Okayasu, Jan J. Kuiper, Ghassan Halouani, HyeJin Kim, Brian W. Miller, América Paz Durán, Angelique Vermeer, Machteld Schoolenberg, Shizuka Hashimoto, Carolyn Lundquist. 2025. Catalyzing change: a literature review on the implementation of the Nature Futures Framework. Sustainability Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-025-01682-y

The Nature Futures Framework (NFF), developed under the Intergovernmental Science–Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), serves as a catalyst for advancing new scenarios and models focused on biodiversity and ecosystem services within the broader research community. In particular, the framework facilitates the development of scenarios and models that can help guide change processes toward desirable fut...

Y Ran, U M Persson, T Lindahl, M Jonell, A Brons, B Macura, J Candel, A Abu Hatab, E Röös. 2025. Are interventions for environmentally sustainable dietary behaviours effective? A review. Environmental Research: Food Systems. https://doi.org/10.1088/2976-601X/adda4e

In the face of growing environmental pressures, understanding how governance can promote more sustainable dietary behaviours is increasingly critical. However, a synthesis of available intervention strategies for behavioural change is currently missing. This umbrella review synthesizes findings from 29 reviews published between 2018–2024, assessing effectiveness of governance interventions aimed at reducing consumer-level food...

Scott Hawken, Christian Isendahl, Keir Strickland, Stephan Barthel. 2025. Towards intergenerational neutrality in urban planning and governance: Reflections on temporality in sustainability transitions research. Urban Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241307907

In urban studies, ‘presentism’ – the prioritisation of present-day concerns at the expense of historical and future considerations – has emerged as a critical bias that is rarely challenged, either through governance structures, institutional frameworks and urban planning and design, or as the ethical basis for our communities and social relations. From the vantage of the historical social sciences, we problematise application...

Petr Vesnovskii, Michele-Lee Moore. 2025. Mapping Global Water Resilience Risks for River Basin Governance. EGU. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-18128

Global water resilience is a critical concern for both nature and society in the face of increasing environmental and socio-economic pressures. Numerous studies have produced global maps highlighting a diversity of water-related risks. Yet, efforts to understand the cumulative nature of those risks and how that information can be used for decision-making remain crucial. This study aims to provide an exploratory global mapping ...