Recent geopolitical events remind us of the need for a resilient, global approach to sustainability science. This Commentary argues that a diverse, bottom-up approach is essential to ensure sustainability science progresses, even amid shifting political processes that threaten international collaboration and funding. Locally driven solutions that value diverse perspectives and knowledge systems are vital for resilience. By supporting community-led action, sharing ideas across regions, and recognising that sustainability means different things in different places, we can build a more flexible, inclusive, and resilient path toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in an uncertain world.

Recent geopolitical events provide a stark reminder of the need to build a resilient, global approach to sustainability science. Centralised, top-down models of sustainability science are likely to be vulnerable to disruptions, from pandemics to wars, that threaten progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals and jeopardise decades of collaborative advancement that are needed to support future progress. We argue that a decentralised, community-empowered model provides the foundation needed for a resilient sustainability scientific effort. By prioritising local solutions, embracing diverse knowledge systems, and fostering horizontal knowledge exchange, we can create a more resilient and adaptable framework. Sustainability science initiatives need to elevate successful local initiatives, adopt transdisciplinary approaches that include underrepresented knowledge holders, build decentralised knowledge-sharing networks, and recognise that sustainability has different meanings across cultural and geographical contexts.

Decentralised sustainability science: local, diverse, and resilient in a fractious and unpredictable world.

This paper examines the recent rejection of the ‘Anthropocene’ as a formal geological epoch to explore how climate anxiety shapes scientific research. While there is broad agreement among scientists about climate change, political and legal action lag behind. Scientists bridge this gap by communicating their findings in ways that influence policy. This effort reflects the broader condition of ‘polycrisis’: multiple overlapping global challenges. I argue that terms like ‘Anthropocene’ and ‘polycrisis’ are not fixed truths, but strategies for taming uncertainty. Scientists, accordingly, are increasingly coming to replace legislators by encouraging certain kinds of present-day action towards more desirable futures.

This paper examines the Anthropocene Working Group's (AWG) effort to formalise a new geological epoch and interprets its 2024 rejection as a case study in the politics of polycrisis. Drawing on ethnographic research with the AWG, it shows how scientific observation is increasingly driven by anticipatory anxiety and a performative impulse to orient action towards uncertain futures. Through the concepts of the technofossil and procedural precedent, the article illustrates how geoscientific methods both generate and respond to normative expectations. The paper argues that polycrisis is not merely descriptive, but constitutes a second-order mode of engaging with the future, wherein political urgency animates what and how scientists observe. In the context of climate change, scientific actors are not only producing knowledge but also seeking to shape policy and social response by innovating within disciplinary protocols. Terms like ‘Anthropocene’ and ‘polycrisis’ are powerful abstractions whose utility lies in their imaginative capacity to narrate contingency and complexity, and imagine solutions by orienting action in the present towards desirable outcomes in the future, rather than in any fixed claim to objectivity.

Anxiety about the future is reshaping science, law, and the way we understand today's overlapping global crises.

This study aimed to analyse the advantages and challenges of the energy transition in an emerging economy such as Colombia via quantitative spatial panel data models using Colombian regions, which included departments from 2015 to 2023, to determine the main relationships between the energy transition and other variables, such as housing features, energy consumption and costs, fossil fuel use, mining, transportation activities, deforestation and livestock activity.

Energy transition is closely related to climate change and is helpful for achieving the main initiative in a broader strategy adopted by governments to contain global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels by the middle of the century. This study uses different empirical methods as quantitative spatial panel data models to determine variables that impact energy transition considering that the limitations of this study are related to the availability of data in every region and information on specific actions to promote energy transition in the regions. The results revealed that regions with higher levels of households, electricity coverage, energy, gasoline and diesel consumption, mining activities, transportation dynamics, deforestation rates and livestock activities generate higher carbon dioxide emissions, whereas regions with greater stable forest and electric vehicle growth rates present lower carbon dioxide emissions. The findings of this study could allow us to formulate suitable public policies to promote just energy transition that could be founded on different knowledge fields, including the industry and productive sector and its role in cleaner production, environmentally friendly infrastructure and technology, building capacities to adopt present and future technological change and create robust regulatory frameworks for their adequate operation, while considering the features and economic activities of territories and the diversification of energy sources as a strategy to promote sustainable energy transition and control climate change. Future research could concentrate on including new variables as renewable energy prices, comparative studies with other Latin American and models to promote knowledge of energy transition and clean technologies.

Energy transition in departments in Colombia: An analysis with spatial econometrics.

The Earth is approaching irreversible tipping points. Markets, democracy, and technology alone cannot address these complex crises. Future Design (FD) tackles these challenges by activating human ability to prioritise future generations’ happiness over immediate gains. This research expands the FD framework and reviews a decade’s worth of studies, deepening our understanding of FD’s potential in creating mechanisms for long-term societal well-being and environmental sustainability.

The Earth is approaching irreversible tipping points across multiple domains. Despite advances in markets, democracy, and science, these systems systematically fail to prioritise future generations’ well-being – creating what we term ‘future failures’. New mechanisms are needed, such as FD. Originating in Japan in the early 2010s, FD aims to design, experiment with, and implement mechanisms that activate our futurability – the ability to prioritise the happiness of future generations over immediate gains – to tackle future failures. This paper introduces presentability and pastability alongside futurability, extending the FD framework. Placing various FD studies from the past decade within this framework, this study reviews mechanisms for activating these abilities and examines how activating one ability affects the others. These abilities are ‘leverage points’, as defined by Meadows. We explore the path to a paradigm shift by designing and using mechanisms that activate these points. This paper also highlights unknowns about FD and potential directions for its development, providing a comprehensive overview of its current state and future prospects in addressing global challenges.

Future Design: A new approach to global crises, prioritising future generations over immediate gains.

To explore how city-level international partnerships can succeed, this study focuses on the sister-city relationship between Wuhan (China) and Manchester (UK), which has demonstrated strong outcomes in sustainability collaboration. Through a detailed analysis of this case, the study identifies three key factors for enduring international collaboration – sustained mutual benefit, broad partnership areas, and deep grassroots engagement – and reveals how they adapt and consolidate over time. These results suggest that international partnerships need to be designed not only to ensure mutual benefit but also to promote inclusiveness and multi-level participation.

The importance of global collaborations in achieving sustainable development is widely recognised. However, establishing and maintaining international partnerships remains a significant challenge. To understand how effective international partnerships can be developed to address sustainability challenges, this study conducts a case study of the Manchester–Wuhan sister-city relationship, a highly successful and representative example of international cooperation on sustainable development. Drawing on insights from 27 semi-structured interviews with stakeholders involved in organising and participating in the initiative, the study shows that the longevity of international partnerships is determined by three core factors: the preservation of mutual benefit, the breadth of cooperation, and profound grassroots involvement. These factors generate both economic and emotional capital, which incentivises governmental and non-governmental actors to deepen their engagement in sustainable urbanisation. This engagement also serves as a buffer against bilateral tensions between the UK and China. These results offer implications for how local initiatives can serve as effective mechanisms for fostering international cooperation in advancing sustainable development.

Building international partnerships for global sustainability requires mutual benefit, inclusiveness, and engagement at multiple levels.

Climate policy discussions often veer into questioning whether actions are worthwhile, if technological fixes are the solution, or if others should take responsibility instead. Interest groups can use these discussions – also known as ‘discourses of climate delay’ – to downplay the need for ambitious climate action. But in other contexts, such discussions can reflect the legitimate concerns of citizens. Here we examine possible ways to make such a distinction and judge when someone intends to delay climate policy.

We conduct a review of the climate policy discourse literature with a focus on how studies evaluate intent. We find that they usually refer to one of three actor-based categories: interest, behaviour, or track record. That is, actors are considered more likely to have intent when they have material or ideological connections to fossil interest groups, behave in ways that undermine climate policy (e.g. through voting or funding oppositional science), or have a track record of rhetorical opposition to climate policy (e.g. having previously articulated climate denial). We further suggest that argument density (e.g. the number of claims they make against climate policy), ambiguity (e.g. whether they leave room for an interpretation of delay), and professional context (e.g. whether they are professional communicators) matters. We summarise these categories to provide a companion to ‘discourses of climate delay’ that focuses on intent. We further consider how the evaluation of intent can support traditional fact and logic-based misinformation identification strategies.

Examine interests, behaviour and track record to evaluate intent in climate delay discourses.

As glaciers shrink and disappear, the benefits they provide to people may also be fading. This makes it more important than ever to look closely at how melting glaciers affect both the environment and the communities that depend on them. To truly understand what is being lost- or even gained- we need to study glaciers from many angles. This includes looking at the science of ice and water, the plural value of nature, local politics, and possible future changes. We bring these different aspects under the framework called socio-glaciology. This method looks beyond just economic impacts and includes political ecology and plural valuations to cover knowledge about health, the ability to move or adapt, cultural traditions, local knowledge, and people’s connection to their land.

As ice retreat undermines glaciers’ contributions to people, there is a pressing need for in-depth analysis of the complex interactions between the glacier environments and the societies living in, and engaging with affected areas in the decades to come. In order to fully understand what is lost, damaged, and even gained, we advocate for a research design that combines glaciology, hydrology, ecosystems services, political ecology, and future scenarios studies. A socio-glaciology approach (SG) can uncover the nuances of non-economic losses, including, but not limited to loss of life, health, technology, human mobility, territory, cultural heritage, and local knowledge.

SG as an interdisciplinary framework proposes to study society–glacier interactions as well as values with a circular research design, by integrating local knowledge, experiences, and preferences with more instrumental tools of scientific observations and computer modeling. We argue for reflexivity, meaning that methodologies for understanding glacier change in relation to people should be grounded in local experiences and preferences, while also being relevant and useful for policy, decision-making, and the development of strategies to manage environments and societies of the cryosphere.

Most research on glaciers has focused on the physiological effects of glacial melt by quantifying the scale of change. We need to bring social science perspectives to identify what these changes actually mean for societies and ecosystem values.

We provide numerical evidence for the significant regional impacts of national-scale wind farms in China on climate and the resultant air pollution redistribution using dynamic numerical weather predictions and a multiscale air quality model. Wind farms in China influence the mesoscale atmospheric circulation in summer with a strong unstable atmosphere, leading to significant regional air pollutant responses. Although they do not produce additional emissions, wind farms redistribute air pollutants due to the change in atmospheric processes. It is urgent for the government and wind power industry to establish better policies and effectiveness measurements for the sustainable development of wind power.

As wind farms have developed rapidly worldwide, the interactions between wind farms and the environment have attracted increasing attention. However, how wind farms influence the climate and the resultant air pollution responses remains unclear. Here, we first show that wind farms in China have significant impacts on both climate and air pollutants by using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) and Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) modeling system. In particular, wind farms influence the mesoscale circulation under unstable conditions in summer, leading to significant regional climatic impacts with a remarkable wind loss of 3.2 m · s−1 in northern China, while a wind gain of 4.24 m · s−1 in southeastern China. Although wind farms do not produce additional emissions, they redistribute air pollutants due to the change in atmospheric processes. As a result, PM2.5 increased in northeastern China with an average of 4.39 μg · m−3 but decreased in southeastern China with a mean of 3.27 μg · m−3 during 2015–2018. More significant impacts can be expected in the future, and urgent attention from the government and industry is required to establish better policies and effectiveness measurements for the sustainable development of wind power.

Wind farm clusters in China significantly affect the local and regional climate and then redistribute air pollution.

This paper reviews the evolution of the Australian fashion and textile industry over the last 50 years as it confronts the challenges of climate change. Given Australia’s susceptibility to trade policies and shifting regulations, the industry needs to adapt to climate pressures, given its significant resource consumption and waste production. This analysis highlights key events that shaped the trading landscape, regulatory changes, and the need for stronger climate policies that bridge environmental responsibility between local and global actors, aiming to reduce the industry’s impact on climate change.

This review examines the Australian fashion and textile industry’s response to climate change from the 1970s to the 2020s, using a methodology adapted from Harvard University comparative review guidelines and incorporating PRISMA . With evolving trade policies and regulatory shifts, this paper highlights the industry’s environmental challenges. This analysis examines the influence of local and international trade regulations and the effectiveness of climate policies in fostering sustainability. Key policy insights include the integration of climate considerations into trade policies to address the environmental impacts of international transactions, aligning trade with global climate goals. Additionally, it advocates for mandatory climate disclosures encompassing onshore and offshore emissions to enhance transparency across the supply chain. This paper calls for stronger alignment between climate and trade policies and expanded producer responsibility, holding both domestic and international actors accountable for environmental impacts.

Reviewing 50 years of Australia’s fashion and textile industry as it adapts to climate pressures & policy shifts.

Two common myths shape thinking about shipping and oceans. First, ships transport nearly everything we consume. Second, we live on planet ocean, not planet earth. Although each claim is, in one sense, correct, each is also misleading. Ships transport 80-90% of international trade (by weight), they transport only 10.8% of the economy's material footprint. Although the ocean covers 71% of the planet's surface, it makes up only 0.12% of its volume. This article queries these widely accepted numbers. Not to ‘correct’ them but to highlight the need to question the common myths that all too often guide environmental intervention.

Ships transport 90% of everything. The planet is 71% ocean. Environmentalists reference these statistics when they advocate ‘buying local’ to reduce shipping's environmental footprint. The shipping industry references them to argue that the industry is ‘too big to fail’ and therefore should not be overly burdened by environmental regulations; furthermore, shipping's emissions are said to be ‘too small to matter,’ considering the role the industry plays in enabling globalised consumer capitalism. Yet, this article shows that ships transport only about 10.8% of everything (by material footprint) and the planet is only 0.12% ocean (by volume). This suggests that we should employ the 90% and 71% figures with caution. Evidence demonstrates that environmental policy derived from crude quantification of an industry's significance can have unintended, and at times unwanted, consequences for the world's economy and, crucially, the planet's environment. Although we do not question the global significance of either the ocean or maritime transport, we argue that for appeals to size and scale to be useful in generating ocean consciousness and guiding policy interventions they need to be questioned every time they are invoked.

Ships transport 80-90% of international trade, but only 11% of the economy's material footprint. This wide gap urges us to rethink common myths about the economy and the environment.

As human development is colliding with planetary boundaries, the world is facing interconnected crises, disasters, and geopolitical conflicts that require and complicate cooperative solutions for navigating the global polycrisis between a collapse of human civilisation and a sustainable transformation of nature–society relationships. When multiple crises are compounding and become ‘overcritical’ beyond tipping points, they may trigger cascading chain reactions that overwhelm efforts to control the dynamics. Understanding the complex dynamic interaction between climate, conflict, migration, and pandemic risks offers insights to develop capabilities for effective earth system governance to facilitate a transformation from a negative to a positive nexus.

To assess the complex interplay and stability conditions of multiple risks in the polycrisis, an integrative framework involves interacting changes, sensitivities, and pathways in nature–society interaction with natural resources and human security. Results highlight the role of additive compounding and multiplicative cascading events for crisis expansion or containment which can be influenced across thresholds by interventions and governance. The analysis is specified for the climate–conflict–migration–pandemic nexus in which the interactions of climate sensitivity and conflict sensitivity affect internal stability against destabilising external factors. For a risk minimization and containment strategy, desirable is a stable low-risk case compared to unlimited risk escalation, compensated by efforts and investments enabling anticipative governance, adaptive management and cooperative institutional mechanisms, moving from individual to collective action and converting a destabilising vicious circle into a stabilising virtuous circle.

The present polycrisis is unprecedented, increasing the interconnectivity, complexity and intensity of interactions with globalisation, breeding instability, overwhelming adaptation, and requiring new anticipative governance and management capacities.

Cities, as complex systems, are faced with increasingly diverse and connected challenges across social, economic, environmental, and health domains. To help cities address these challenges, the Future Earth Urban Knowledge-Action Network developed a cross-disciplinary urban research agenda through expert elicitations and extensive consultation. Five research themes to guide urban sustainability research were identified including: (1) advancing urban sustainability transformations, (2) ensuring equity, (3) boosting innovation in low to lower-middle income countries, (4) managing complexity and systemic risks, and (5) navigating environmental change. Advancing this agenda will require collaboration across disciplines and geographies, transdisciplinary coproduction, and enhanced support to urban science.

Cities and urban regions are at the forefront of transformations toward global sustainability. As urbanization accelerates, there is increasing demand for cities to play multiple, complex and synthetic roles across social and environmental domains within and beyond their boundaries, for example driving economic development while mitigating and adapting to global environmental changes. To help cities in meeting this challenge, urban science, a rapidly growing field that includes inter- and transdisciplinary research, needs to expand and evolve, with clear priorities. Combining expert elicitation and community consultation, the Future Earth Urban Knowledge-Action Network developed a strategic research agenda for urban science for the next decade. The urban science research agenda describes five critical research themes for scientific advances: (1) accelerate urban sustainability transformations, (2) ensure equity and inclusivity, (3) amplify innovation from the low to lower-middle income countries, (4) negotiate complexity and systemic risks, and (5) navigate environmental change. Under each research theme, we review the state of the art, identify remaining gaps, and outline key research questions needing to be addressed to advance science toward urban transformations. Interconnections across, and enabling conditions to advance, these priority research themes are discussed.

Globally co-designed urban research agenda reveals pressing priorities for sustainability and resilience.

The term ‘polycrisis’ is gaining attention among academics, policymakers, and the public. Unlike a single crisis, a polycrisis involves complex, interconnected risks across multiple regions and systems, often including ecological factors. This interconnectedness heightens the chances of widespread adverse outcomes or disasters, affecting various systems and triggering cascading effects. The article examines how traditional disaster studies concepts must be adapted for the polycrisis context and places historical events on a spectrum of such critical moments. It concludes with recommendations for communities to build resilience and respond democratically to these challenges.

The term ‘polycrisis’ has entered the lexicon of a growing circle of academics, policymakers, and the public. Polycrisis is a state that encompasses a complex set of risks characterized by multiple, macroregional, and often ecologically embedded linkages between inexorably interconnected systems. The article reevaluates disaster studies concepts within this polycrisis framework, locates historical events along a spectrum of such moments, and offers recommendations for democratic resilience.

Discover how the term ‘polycrisis’ redefines our understanding of interconnected risks and informs new disaster response methods.

This article explores air pollution as a globally connected issue using the telecoupling lens, which links distant regions through environmental and human systems. It shows how pollution connects Africa and the Global North, demonstrating that actions in one place affect people and air quality elsewhere. Drawing on 90 research sources, it looks at how satellite data helps monitor air quality and finds that most studies focus on natural sciences, with limited input from social sciences and less frequently from African researchers. The authors highlight the need to close data gaps and call for more inclusive, cross-disciplinary, and international cooperation in air quality research. Overall, the study pushes for fairer, more connected approaches to understanding and tackling air pollution worldwide.

Air quality (AQ) is a transboundary phenomenon resulting from globalized interactions between coupled human and natural systems. Drawing on the telecoupling framework, this article argues that pollution flows, socioeconomic systems, and policy responses interconnect Africa with the Global North and identifies important data gaps for better understanding these interconnections. Through a meta-synthesis of 90 academic and gray literature sources, we analyze the use of satellite data for air quality monitoring, with a particular focus on interdisciplinary collaboration and African scientific participation. Our findings highlight a strong reliance on natural science approaches, limited integration of social science perspectives, and ongoing marginalization of African voices in shaping research agendas. We argue for a transformative research agenda rooted in interdisciplinary integration, inter-regional collaboration, and data justice. By adopting a telecoupled lens and prioritizing inclusive development, this study provides new pathways to understand, measure, and address air pollution as a global issue with deeply local consequences.

Air pollution links Africa & the Global North–study urges data justice & inclusive, global cooperation.

Climate hazard events, such as floods and heatwaves, are becoming more frequent and severe. This paper focuses on coastal urban areas and addresses the need for implementing effective ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA) measures. It highlights the importance of integrating EbA into urban planning to enhance resilience. The study proposes a comprehensive assessment framework to guide EbA implementation process at the local level. Governance system, policy framework, and funding sources are identified as key factors influencing the process. Within governance structures, the study focuses on cooperation, decision-making processes, scientific knowledge, and political support. Plans and strategies, regulations, international treaties, or agreements are recognized within policy sphere. The framework also considers the importance of sustainable funding mechanisms, including public–private partnerships and fiscal incentives, to ensure the long-term viability of EbA interventions. The framework's applicability and effectiveness are tested by assessing 10 implementation experiences in Spain and Portugal. The assessment underscores the need for adaptive governance and the inclusion of diverse stakeholders in planning and execution. The research concludes with the need for a systemic approach to integrating EbA into local adaptation strategies, to bridge the knowledge gap between researchers and practitioners, foster adaptation in coastal urban environments, and increase climate resilience.

Irrigation relies on groundwater, but depletion threatens food supply, rural livelihoods, and ecosystems. Nature-based Solutions can potentially combat groundwater depletion, typically combining physical and natural infrastructure to benefit both people and nature. However, social infrastructure (e.g., rules and norms) is also needed but is under-studied for NbS used in agricultural groundwater management. Through a narrative review, we find that social infrastructure is infrequently described with an emphasis on using Nature-based Solutions to augment supply rather than manage demand.

Groundwater faces depletion worldwide, threatening irrigators who rely on it. Supply-side interventions to drill deeper or import water greater distances have not reduced this threat. Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are increasingly promoted as leveraging natural infrastructure to reduce depletion. However, there is growing evidence that without social infrastructure (e.g., social norms, capacities and knowledge), NbS will reproduce the problems of technical approaches. How can social infrastructure be implemented within agricultural groundwater NbS to overcome groundwater depletion? Through a narrative review of the literature on agricultural groundwater NbS, we evaluate how social infrastructure has been implemented to (1) enable coordination, (2) monitor and manage change over time, and (3) achieve social fit. Our analysis covers diverse cases from around the world and various points in time, ranging from ancient civilizations to present-day. We conclude that social infrastructure is essential to effective agricultural groundwater NbS but understudied. We also propose further research on NbS designs that rely only on social and natural infrastructure by focusing on ecological fit between agricultural practices and their local environments.

A review of nature-based solutions for agricultural groundwater management finds that social infrastructure is key.