Publications

Silvia Bucci, Daria Tatsii, Ioanna Evangelou, Lucie Bakels, Andreas Stohl. 2025. Tracking the sources of atmospheric microplastic using FLEXPART v.11. EGU. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-16953

An emerging number of studies highlighted the presence of microplastic in the atmosphere all over the world. The presence of such particles has been observed at the poles, in the marine atmosphere above the surface of the oceans, in clouds, on the fresh snow of high mountains and high concentrations has been observed in the atmospheric fallout in densely populated areas. Despite so, the main sources of atmospheric microplastic...

Hannah Zoller, Juan Rocha, Ingo Fetzer, C. Kendra Gotangco Gonzales, Nitin Chaudhary, Steve Lade. 2025. A bottom-up spatial pattern of Earth system interactions. EGU. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-12239

The intricate interplay of the Earth system’s biophysical processes provides the basis for Earth resilience and human wellbeing. While this interplay has been systematically studied on a global scale, a better understanding of the sub-global interactions is crucial in order to fully assess the systemic environmental impact of human activities. Building on the quantitative framework provided by the Earth system impact metric ...

Johan Rockström, Jennie Barron. 2025. A reply to Lankford and Agol (2024). Irrigation is more than irrigating: agricultural green water interventions contribute to blue water depletion and the global water crisis. Water International. https://doi.org/10.1080/02508060.2025.2452115

Callum M. Roberts, Emilia Dyer, Sylvia A. Earle, Andrew Forrest, Julie P. Hawkins, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Jessica J. Meeuwig, Daniel Pauly, Stuart L. Pimm, U. Rashid Sumaila, Johan Rockström, Mark Lynas. 2025. Why we should protect the high seas from all extraction, forever. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-01665-0

International waters, also known as the high seas, make up 61% of the ocean and cover 43% of Earth’s surface — amounting to two-thirds of the biosphere by volume. They have been exploited since the seventeenth century for whales, and from the mid-twentieth century for fish, sharks and squid, depleting wildlife. Now, climate change is reducing the productivity of the high seas through warming and through depletion of nutrients ...

E. Röös, M. Jacobsen, L. Karlsson, W. Wanecek, J. Spångberg, R. Mazac, L. Rydhmer. 2025. Introducing a comprehensive and configurable tool for calculating environmental and social footprints for use in dietary assessments. Journal of Cleaner Production. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2025.146002

The urgent need to transform dietary patterns to mitigate climate change, biodiversity loss, and other environmental challenges is well-established. While life cycle assessments and footprinting approaches provide valuable insights at the product level, comprehensive evaluations of entire diets are necessary to inform sustainable food choices. This paper presents the Sustainability Assessment of Foods And Diets (SAFAD)-tool, a...

Elizabeth M. Cook, Yeowon Kim, Nancy B. Grimm, Timon McPhearson, Pippin Anderson, Harriet Bulkeley, Marcus J. Collier, Loan Diep, Jordi Morató, Weiqi Zhou. 2025. Nature-based solutions for urban sustainability. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2315909122

The objective of this paper is to introduce a Special Feature: “Nature-based Solutions for Urban Sustainability”—a collection of four articles addressing the current state of global urban NbS science and conceptual framings. The special feature explores opportunities for research and practice to scale up NbS to address equity, justice, and inclusion while enabling transformation in urbanized areas. The special feature includes...

Taís Sonetti-González, María Mancilla García, Tilman Hertz, Ana Paula Aguiar. 2025. Reimagining the liminal Cerrado: the virtual ancestral future. Ecology and Society. https://doi.org/10.5751/es-16155-300307

This paper examines transformations in social-ecological system through the process-relational perspective (PRP), using the concepts of the “ real-possible, ” the existing reality, and the “ actual-virtual ” potentials that exist beyond current hegemonic thinking and practices—framed within the Latin American feminist concept of Nepantla, which refers to a liminal space of transition, ambiguity, and transformation wher...

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...