Publications

Detlef P. van Vuuren, Jonathan C. Doelman, Isabela Schmidt Tagomori, Arthur H. W. Beusen, Sarah E. Cornell, Johan Röckstrom, Aafke M. Schipper, Elke Stehfest, Geanderson Ambrosio, Maarten van den Berg, Lex Bouwman, Vassilis Daioglou, Mathijs Harmsen, Paul Lucas, Kaj-Ivar van der Wijst, Willem-Jan van Zeist. 2025. Exploring pathways for world development within planetary boundaries. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08928-w

The pressures humanity has been placing on the environment have put Earth’s stability at risk. The planetary boundaries framework serves as a method to define a ‘safe operating space for humanity and has so far been applied mostly to highlight the currently prevailing unsustainable environmental conditions. The ability to evaluate trends over time, however, can help us explore the consequences of alternative policy decisions a...

Roberto Schaeffer, E. Lisa F. Schipper, Daniel Ospina, Paula Mirazo, Ane Alencar, Mehrnaz Anvari, Paulo Artaxo, Mehmet Efe Biresselioglu, Tanja Blome, Melanie Boeckmann, Ebba Brink, Wendy Broadgate, Mercedes Bustamante, Wenju Cai, Josep G. Canadell, Roberto Cardinale, Maria Paz Chidichimo, Peter Ditlevsen, Ursula Eicker, Sarah Feron, Mahelet G. Fikru, Sabine Fuss, Amadou T. Gaye, Örjan Gustafsson, Niklas Harring, Cheng He, Sophie Hebden, Adrian Heilemann, Marina Hirota, Nandakumar Janardhanan, Sirkku Juhola, Tae Yong Jung, Jiang Kejun, Şiir Kilkiș, Nilushi Kumarasinghe, David Lapola, June-Yi Lee, Carolina Levis, Adelaide Lusambili, Joannes D. Maasakkers, Claire MacIntosh, Jemilah Mahmood, Justin S. Mankin, Pía Marchegiani, Maria Martin, Aditi Mukherji, Tischa A. Muñoz-Erickson, Zeenat Niazi, Joseph Nyangon, Santosh Pandipati, Amarasinghage T.D. Perera. 2025. Ten new insights in climate science 2024. One Earth. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2025.101285

The years 2023 and 2024 were characterized by unprecedented warming across the globe, underscoring the urgency of climate action. Robust science advice for decision makers on subjects as complex as climate change requires deep cross- and interdisciplinary understanding. However, navigating the ever-expanding and diverse peer-reviewed literature on climate change is enormously challenging for individual researchers. We elicited...

Nico Wunderling, Boris Sakschewski, Johan Rockström, Bernardo Flores, Marina Hirota, Arie Staal. 2025. Pinpointing Amazon forest tipping in global warming and deforestation pathways. Research Square. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-5840795/v1

Humanity is putting unprecedented pressures on the Amazon forest systems due to global warming, deforestation, land-use change as well as large-scale infrastructure projects. Since the Amazon forest may possess a tipping point beyond which detrimental changes are self-propelling, these pressures could lead to system-wide state changes across major parts of the Amazon forest. We apply a dynamical systems model to assess the tip...

Xander Huggins. 2025. A review of open data for studying global groundwater in social-ecological systems. EGU. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-20627

Global data have served an integral role in characterizing large-scale groundwater systems, identifying their sustainability challenges, and informing on socioeconomic and ecological dimensions of groundwater. These insights have revealed groundwater as a dynamic component of both the water cycle and social-ecological systems, leading to an expansion in groundwater science that increasingly focuses on interactions between grou...

Xander Huggins, Melissa M. Rohde. 2025. Groundwater-dependent ecosystem map exposes global dryland protection needs. EGU. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-14986

Groundwater’s role in supporting ecosystems worldwide is rarely acknowledged. Groundwater-dependent ecosystems (GDEs), which depend on groundwater for some or all of their water needs, are diverse and include desert springs, mountain meadows and streams, coastal wetlands and forests. However, the location of these ecosystems worldwide has been largely unknown, hindering our ability to track impacts, establish protective polici...

Veronica Olofsson, Maria Mancilla Garcia, Antonio J. Castro, Sofía Cortés Calderón, Amadou Hamath Diallo, Amanda Jiménez Aceituno, María D. López-Rodríguez, Taís Sonetti Gonzalez, Amanda Sousa Silvino, Ana Paula Aguiar. 2025. The multifaceted spectra of power − A participatory network analysis on power structures in diverse dryland regions. Global Environmental Change. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2025.102984

With intensifying climate change impacts on dryland regions, it is essential to better understand how actors relate to each other to sustainably manage natural resources. The literature on environmental governance networks has studied actor collaborations, but it is only starting to investigate networks that sustain conflictive situations. Moreover, while actors traditionally defined as powerful have received important scholar...

Felix Creutzig, Timon McPhearson, Ronita Bardhan, Camille Belmin, Winston T. L. Chow, Matthias Garschagen, Angel Hsu, Şiir Kılkış, Sheikh Tawhidul Islam, Nikola Milojevic-Dupont, Minal Pathak, Rafael H. M. Pereira, Pourya Salehi, Diana Ürge-Vorsatz. 2025. Bridging the scale between the local particular and the global universal in climate change assessments of cities. Nature Cities. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-025-00226-w

Identifying gaps in urban climate change assessment is crucial for developing the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report on cities. To bridge the gap between the understanding of local interventions and global climate goals, we call for the strengthening of assessment tools such as urban typologies, case study synthesis and big geospatial data studies. We sort research gaps into five overarching th...

Costanza Conti, Andrew Hall, Kristiaan Kok, Per Olsson, Michele-Lee Moore, Claire Kremen, Amar Laila, Line J. Gordon, Anne Barnhill, Sofie te Wierik, Anna Norberg, Bianca Carducci, Sumati Bajaj, Matthew Gibson, Thais Diniz Oliveira, A. Charlotte Bunge, Tim G. Williams, Rachel Mazac, Mary Scheuermann, Jessica Fanzo. 2025. A quest for questions: The JUSTRA as a matrix for navigating just food system transformations in an era of uncertainty. One Earth. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2025.101178

A just food system transformation is imperative to meet this century's goals of environmental sustainability, economic fairness, and equitable social well-being. While considerations of justice are beginning to inform food system transformation debates, there remains a lack of conceptual and practical integration of these two historically separate disciplinary perspectives. This perspective therefore proposes the just transfor...

Anne Charlotte Bunge, Michael Clark, Line J. Gordon. 2025. “Fika in the Anthropocene”: leveraging food systems transformations through food cultures. Sustainability Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-025-01680-0

The role of food cultures in food systems transformations is gaining prominence in scholarly discourse. However, several food cultures rely on products with substantial environmental and socio-economic impacts and risks, raising questions about their potential role in transformation processes toward more sustainable food systems. One such example constitutes the Swedish Fika , the daily practice of having coffee and pastries...

Daniel Itzamna Avila-Ortega, Peter Søgaard Jørgensen, Sarah Cornell, Daniel Moran, Gustav Engstrom. 2025. Accounting for biodiversity impacts of consumption and production: current gaps and frontiers. EcoEvoRxiv. https://doi.org/10.32942/X2J33R

The way humans produce and consume material goods continues to be a primary driving force on biodiversity decline. Despite significant advances in quantifying biodiversity footprints, important differences exist across types of approaches and indicators. These include, what aspects of biodiversity are measured and how they are reported. In this scoping review, we provide an overview of biodiversity impact metrics developed to ...