This review examines the alleged crisis of trust in environmental science and its impact on public opinion, policy decisions in the context of democratic governance, and the interaction between science and society. In an interdisciplinary manner, the review focuses on the following themes: the trustworthiness of environmental science, empirical studies on levels of trust and trust formation; social media, environmental science, and disinformation; trust in environmental governance and democracy; and co-production of knowledge and the production of trust in knowledge. The review explores both the normative issue of trustworthiness and empirical studies on how to build trust. The review does not provide any simple answers to whether trust in science is generally in decline or whether we are returning to a lessenlightened era in public life with decreased appreciation of knowledge and truth. The findings are more nuanced, showing signs of both distrust and trust in environmental science.

Global consumption of agrochemicals continues to rise, despite growing evidence of their adverse effects on environmental quality and human health. The extent of increase varies across nations, by type of chemical compounds and by severity of the detrimental impacts. The differential impacts are largely attributable to the level of technology adoption and regulation as well as their enforcement and compliance. The article highlights gaps in technical, legal, and social aspects, which include the paucity of holistic and long-term ecological impact assessment frameworks and lack of consideration for the social dimensions of pesticide use in regulatory decisions. Bridging these gaps, establishing global cooperation for regulation and governance, and a regional/national-level monitoring mechanism are suggested. This, complemented with a policy shift from the current approach of productivity enhancement to augmenting agroecosystem services, would encourage sustainable and nature-positive agriculture equipped to meet the multiple challenges of food security, ecological safety, and climate resilience.

Oceans play critical roles in the lives, economies, cultures, and nutrition of people globally, yet face increasing pressures from human activities that put those benefits at risk. To anticipate the future of the world's ocean, we review the many human activities that impose pressures on marine species and ecosystems, evaluating their impacts on marine life, the degree of scientific uncertainty in those assessments, and the expected trajectory over the next few decades. We highlight that fundamental research should prioritize areas of high potential impact and greater uncertainty about ecosystem vulnerability, such as emerging fisheries, organic chemical pollution, seabed mining, and the interactions of cumulative pressures, and deprioritize research on areas that demonstrate little impact or are well understood, such as plastic pollution and ship strikes to marine fauna. There remains hope for a productive and sustainable future ocean, but the window of opportunity for action is closing.

This review engages with literature on authoritarian populism, focusing specifically on its relationship to the environment. We analyze hybrid combinations of authoritarianism and populism to explore three themes from the literature: environmental governance, social and political representations of nature, and resistance. In the environmental governance section, we analyze how governments have increasingly resorted to populist politics to expand extractivism; certain commodities with national security implications have become key commodities to be protected; and borders, frontiers, and zones of inclusion/exclusion have become flash points. In the social and political representations of nature section, we analyze settler colonialism and sacrifice zones as organizing principles for relations with the environment. In our final section on resistance, we review literature highlighting pushback to authoritarian populism from peasant, indigenous, and worker movements. Variants of populism and authoritarianism are likely to persist amid increasing competition over resources as components of responses to environmental and climate crisis.

Great claims have been made about the benefits of dematerialization in a digital service economy. However, digitalization has historically increased environmental impacts at local and planetary scales, affecting labor markets, resource use, governance, and power relationships. Here we study the past, present, and future of digitalization through the lens of three interdependent elements of the Anthropocene: ( a) planetary boundaries and stability, ( b) equity within and between countries, and ( c) human agency and governance, mediated via ( i) increasing resource efficiency, ( ii) accelerating consumption and scale effects, ( iii) expanding political and economic control, and ( iv) deteriorating social cohesion. While direct environmental impacts matter, the indirect and systemic effects of digitalization are more profoundly reshaping the relationship between humans, technosphere and planet. We develop three scenarios: planetary instability, green but inhumane, and deliberate for the good. We conclude with identifying leverage points that shift human–digital–Earth interactions toward sustainability.

Discounting plays a central role in decisions about global environmental change that affect the well-being of future generations. Discounting the future more heavily tilts decisions toward the present, making it less likely that society will undertake actions to mitigate climate change or other global environmental change. This article reviews the standard economics approach to discounting that emerges from solving for optimal savings and investment through time. Discounting depends on the pure rate of time preference and differences in consumption levels across time, giving rise to different marginal utilities of consumption. Discounting for problems like climate change that impact future generations involves an ethical dimension. This article includes discussions of ethical dimensions of discounting related to intragenerational and intergenerational equity and also covers behavioral economics, ecological economics, and mainstream economics approaches to discounting. The article closes with a review of the debates over discounting in climate change policy.

Ongoing deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is the outcome of an explicit federal project to occupy, integrate, and “modernize” the region. Although there have been isolated periods of deforestation control, most recently between 2004 and 2012, the overall trajectory of the region since the colonial period has been one of forest loss and degradation. Addressing this challenge is especially urgent in the context of adverse climate-ecology feedbacks and tipping points. Here we describe the trends and outcomes of deforestation and degradation in the Amazon. We then highlight how historical development paradigms and policies have helped to cement the land use activities and structural lock-ins that underpin deforestation and degradation. We emphasize how the grounds for establishing a more sustainable economy in the Amazon were never consolidated, leading to a situation where forest conservation and development remain dependent on external programs—punitive measures against deforestation and fire and public social programs. This situation makes progress toward a forest transition(arresting forest loss and degradation and restoring forest landscapes) highly vulnerable to changes in political leadership, private sector engagement, and global market signals. After summarizing these challenges, we present a suite of measures that collectively could be transformational to helping overcome destructive path dependencies in the region. These include innovations in agricultural management, improved forest governance through landscape approaches, developing a local forest economy, sustainable peri-urbanization, and the empowerment of women and youth. These initiatives must be inclusive and equitable, enabling the participation and empowerment of local communities, particularly indigenous groups who have faced numerous historical injustices and are increasingly under threat by current politics.

The availability and use of fresh water are critical for human health and for economic and ecosystem stability. But the growing mismatch between human demands and natural freshwater availability is contributing to water scarcity, affecting industrial and agricultural production and a wide range of social, economic, and political problems, including poverty, deterioration of ecosystem health, and violent conflicts. Understanding and addressing different forms of water scarcity are vital for moving toward more sustainable management and use of fresh water. We provide here a review of concepts and definitions of water scarcity, metrics and indicators used to evaluate scarcity together with strategies for addressing and reducing the adverse consequences of water scarcity, including the development of alternative sources of water, improvements in water-use efficiency, and changes in systems of water management and planning.

This article provides a systematic review of the literature on net-zero carbon cities, their objectives and key features, current efforts, and performance. We discuss how net-zero differs from low-carbon cities, how different visions of a net-zero carbon city relate to urban greenhouse gas accounting, deep decarbonization pathways and their application to cities and urban infrastructure systems, net-zero carbon cities in theory versus practice, lessons learned from net-zero carbon city plans and implementation, and opportunities and challenges in transitioning toward net-zero carbon cities across both sectors and various spatial fabrics within cities. We conclude that it is possible for cities to get to or near net-zero carbon, but this requires systemictransformation. Crucially, a city cannot achieve net-zero by focusing only on reducing emissions within its administrative boundaries. Cities must decarbonize key transboundary supply chains and use urban and regional landscapes to sequester carbon from the atmosphere. Because of carbon lock-in, and the complex interplay between urban infrastructure and behavior, strategic sequencing of mitigation action is essential for cities to achieve net-zero.

Visions of planting walls of trees to block the expansion of the desert have long been promoted but never fully realized. The green wall myth persists today even though it is premised on outdated understandings of desertification. We review the history of the idea of green walls and focus on two sets of contemporary initiatives to assess their outcomes: peri-Saharan programs (Algeria's Green Dam and Great Green Wall in sub-Saharan Africa) and China's Three Norths Shelterbelt Program. This review reveals a mixed record of technical success with low rates of tree establishment, particularly in drier areas and monocultures of fast-growing trees vulnerable to disease. While there is evidence for reduced wind erosion in some areas, afforestation is also associated with reduced soil moisture and lowering of water tables. Social impacts include increased water scarcity for people and livestock in some cases, and resource enclosures that particularly work against pastoralist livelihoods.Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, Volume 48 is October 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

When deep recessions hit, some governments spend to rescue and recover their economies. Key economic objectives of such countercyclical spending include protecting and creating jobs while reinvigorating economic growth—but governments can also use this spending to achieve long-term social and environmental goals. During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, claims have been made that green recovery investments can meet both economic and environmental objectives. Here, we investigate the evidence behind these claims. We create a bespoke supervised machine learning algorithm to identify a comprehensive literature set. We analyze this literature using both structured qualitative assessment and machine learning models. We find evidence that green investments can indeed create more jobs and deliver higher fiscal multipliers than non-green investments. For policymakers, we suggest strong prioritization of green spending in recovery. For researchers, we highlight many research gaps and unalignment of research patterns with spending patterns.

The global food system faces major risks and threats that can cause massive economic loss; dislocation of food supply chains; and welfare loss of producers, consumers, and other food system actors. The interrelated nature of the system has highlighted the complexity of risks. Climate change, extreme weather events, and degradation and depletion of natural resources, including water, arable, forestry, and pastural lands, loss of biodiversity, emerging diseases, trade chokepoints and disruptions, macroeconomic shocks, and conflicts, can each seriously disrupt the system. Coincidence of these risks can compound the effects on global food security and nutrition. Smallholder farmers, rural migrants, women, youth, children, low-income populations, and other disadvantaged groups are particularly vulnerable. The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic exemplifies a perfect storm of coincidental risks. This article reviews major risks that most significantly impact food systems and highlights the importance of prospects for coincidence of risks. We present pathways to de-risk food systems and a way forward to ensure healthy, sustainable, inclusive, and resilient food systems.

The past century has been a time of unparalleled changes in global climate and global biogeochemistry. At the forefront of the study of these changes are regular time-series observations at remote stations of atmospheric CO2, isotopes of CO2, and related species, such as O2 and carbonyl sulfide (COS). These records now span many decades and contain a wide spectrum of signals, from seasonal cycles to long-term trends. These signals are variously related to carbon sources and sinks, rates of photosynthesis and respiration of both land and oceanic ecosystems, and rates of air-sea exchange, providing unique insights into natural biogeochemical cycles and their ongoing changes. This review provides a broad overview of these records, focusing on what they have taught us about large-scale global biogeochemical change.

Environmental factors, particularly those related to climate change, are stranding or could strand assets across different sectors and geographies with significant implications for economies, companies, financial institutions, communities, and workers. In this review, we focus on physical climate change, biodiversity loss, and litigation related to environmental factors as causes of stranded assets. We also review the emerging literature on the consequences of asset stranding for society before turning to some of the key supervisory responses that are emerging to ensure that stranded assets are measured and managed, particularly by financial institutions. These are among the areas of the stranded assets literature that have been growing most rapidly since 2015, and we focus on the literature produced since then.

We present an overview of the global spatiotemporal distribution of avian biodiversity, changes in our knowledge of that biodiversity, and the extent to which it is imperilled. Birds are probably the most completely inventoried large taxonomic class of organisms, permitting a uniquely detailed understanding of how the Anthropocene has shaped their distributions and conservation status in space and time. We summarize the threats driving changes in bird species richness and abundance, highlighting the increasingly synergistic interactions between threats such as habitat loss, climate change, and overexploitation. Many metrics of avian biodiversity are exhibiting globally consistent negative trends, with the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List Index showing a steady deterioration in the conservation status of the global avifauna over the past three decades. We identify key measures to counter this loss of avian biodiversity and associated ecosystemservices, which will necessitate increased consideration of the social context of bird conservation interventions in order to deliver positive transformative change for nature.

More food and energy allow for more people who then require more food and energy, and so it has gone for centuries. At the same time, economic progress leads to a different lifestyle with an increasing demand for energy and food, also accelerating food waste. Fueling this food-energy-population dynamic is an ever-increasing conversion of unreactive dinitrogen (N2) to reactive N (Nr), which then results in a cascade of positive (food and energy for people) and negative (damage to people, climate, biodiversity, and environment) impacts as Nr is distributed throughout Earth systems. The most important step in reducing the environmental impacts of Nr is limiting its human-based creation. In this article, therefore, we focus on this most important first step: the conversion of N2 to Nr by human activities. Specifically, we examine Nr creation and use (they are different!) on a global and regional basis and Nr use on a global and regional per capita basis. In addition, we introduce the metric Nr Use Index (NUI), which can be used to track and project Nr use relative to a fixed point in time. We then assess the progress in Nr management over the past 20 years. Our article presents a case study of the Netherlands to show what one country, beset by Nr-relatedproblems that have led to an N crisis, did to address those problems and what worked and what didn't work. The article concludes with an assessment of what the future might hold with respect to Nr creation and use, including a review of other projections. We expect that NUI will increase especially in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The other parts of the world are consolidating or even decreasing NUI. In Latin America and Asia, there is limited agricultural land, and by increasing NUI for food the risk of Nr pollution is very high. The Netherlands has shown not only what effects can be expected with increasing NUI but also what successful policies can be introduced to limit environmental losses. Our assessment shows that Nr creation needs to be limited to prevent local to global environmental impacts.

Environmentalist, Indigenous, and agrarian and food justice movements that mobilize across and beyond national borders are demanding recognition and participation in debates and policies that shape planetary futures. We review recent social movements that challenge agendas set by corporations, elites, states, conservative movements, and some international governance institutions. We pay particular attention to novel concepts that emerged from or were popularized by these movements, such as environmental justice, climate debt, Indigenous-led conservation, food sovereignty, agroecology, extractivism, and Vivir Bien (“Living Well”). Such concepts and agendas increasingly enter international governance spaces, influence global policy debates, build innovative institutions, and converge across class, geographic, and sectoral lines. Although they face daunting obstacles—particularly the free-market zealotry that dominates international policymaking and the agribusiness, mining, energy, and other corporate-philanthropic lobbies—the visions proffered by these movements offer new possibilities for creating a world that prioritizes the intrinsic value of nature and all its beings.

Coastal settlements, home to more than three billion people and growing rapidly, are highly vulnerable to climate change. Increasingly, there are calls for climate adaptation that goes beyond business-as-usual approaches, transforms socioeconomic systems, and addresses underlying drivers of vulnerability. Although calls for transformational adaptation are growing, greater clarity is needed on what transformation means in context in order to bridge the gap between theory and practice. This article reviews the theoretical literature on transformational adaptation, as well as practitioner frameworks and case studies of urban coastal adaptation. The article discusses specific challenges for transformational adaptation and its governance in coastal cities. In doing so, this review contributes to the growing debate about operationalizing the concept of transformational adaptation in the context of coastal cities and offers insights to ensure that transformation processes are inclusive and equitable.

The academic public health and biomedical communities have a long history of researching and documenting the adverse impacts of pollution on human health. However, the healthcare industry itself is a major contributor to pollution as well as the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions responsible for global warming. For example, the health sectors of the United States, Australia, England, and Canada are estimated to emit a combined 748 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents annually, equivalent to a nation that would rank seventh in the world for GHG emissions. Moreover, the healthcare sector is a major consumer of natural resources, thereby contributing to the imbalances characteristic of what is increasingly being referred to as the Anthropocene and a threat to planetary health. In this article, we summarize current information on the healthcare industry's environmental footprint and the potential for markedly reducing that footprint by applying the principles and tools of sustainability science. We discuss some of the industry's special challenges, including those associated with new construction (which have undergone relatively little examination in relation to sustainability, despite predictions of accelerated growth). We examine current ideas and efforts to advance sustainability solutions in the healthcare industry, in high-, middle-, and low-income countries alike, where the healthcare industry can be expected to grow the fastest. Finally, we review case studies and discuss research needs.

This article undertakes a comprehensive review of tourism's impacts on social-ecological systems and the use of the local to global commons. It examines a wide range of issues from climate change and air travel to biodiversity loss, pollution, and overtourism. It reinforces that tourism in modernity has pursued a dominant growth-driven paradigm of development and market expansion that is unsustainable. The review raises critical questions about how to move forward in the Anthropocene, where climate change is an existential threat to which travel and tourism must adjust. We offer directions for knowledge creation to develop nature-positive tourism that decouples from greenhouse gas emissions and seeks the regeneration of natural capital and communal health and well-being. This direction includes rethinking the purposes and values of tourism by addressing equity and ethical issues. It also calls for inclusivity of diverse worldviews and knowledge systems, including traditional and Indigenous knowledge. Such a pluralistic paradigm replaces the unsustainable modernist tourism paradigm that has dominated its evolution. We conclude with suggestions for research to advance nature-positive tourism.