Publications

Mattia Saccò, Xander Huggins, Alejandro Martínez, Robert Reinecke. 2025. Collaborative Science for Groundwater Biodiversity Conservation. Groundwater. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwat.13495

Depletion and quality degradation of groundwater ecosystems trigger impacts on diverse, highly specialized, and often locally endemic biota, ranging from microbes to cavefish. The extent to which groundwater ecosystems are threatened is alarming: underground biological extinction is already happening (Humphreys 2022 ). The full breadth of this challenge is unknown, yet the large-scale and widespread depletion and quality deg...

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...

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...

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...

Tilman Hertz, Anja Klein, Maria Mancilla García, Maja Schlüter. 2025. Transforming a world that never stands still. Ecosystems and People. https://doi.org/10.1080/26395916.2025.2469859

Process-relational perspectives (PRP) have been put forward as a crucial contribution for conceptualizing radical transformations towards sustainability. This is because PRP conceptualize transformations as open processes. This openness is attributed, first, to processes and relations having performative power, which means that processes and relations are constitutive of elements. Second, PRP take processes and relations as co...