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The five biggest threats to our natural world … and how we can stop them

From destructive land use to invasive species, scientists have identified the main drivers of biodiversity loss – so that countries can collectively act to tackle them

• Read more on the Cop15 talks to negotiate new UN targets to protect biodiversity in the coming decade
• 1 Changes in land and sea use
• 2 Direct exploitation of natural resources
• 3 The climate crisis
• 4 Pollution
• 5 Invasive species

T he world’s wildlife populations have plummeted by more than two-thirds since 1970 – and there are no signs that this downward trend is slowing. The first phase of Cop15 talks in Kunming this week will lay the groundwork for governments to draw up a global agreement next year to halt the loss of nature. If they are to succeed, they will need to tackle what the IPBES (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) has identified as the five key drivers of biodiversity loss: changes in land and sea use; direct exploitation of natural resources; climate change; pollution; and invasion of alien species.

Changes in land and sea use

Clearing the US prairies: ‘On a par with tropical deforestation’

“It’s hidden destruction. We’re still losing grasslands in the US at a rate of half a million acres a year or more.”

Tyler Lark, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, knows what he is talking about. Lark and a team of researchers used satellite data to map the expansion and abandonment of land across the US and discovered that 4m hectares (10m acres) had been destroyed between 2008 and 2016.

Large swathes of the United States’ great prairies continue to be converted into cropland, according to the research, to make way for soya bean, corn and wheat farming.

Changes in land and sea use has been identified as the main driver of “unprecedented” biodiversity and ecosystem change over the past 50 years. ​​ Three-quarters of the land-based environment and about 66% of the marine environment have been significantly altered by human actions.

North America’s grasslands – often referred to as prairies – are a case in point. In the US, about half have been converted since European settlement , and the most fertile land is already being used for agriculture. Areas converted more recently are sub-prime agricultural land, with 70% of yields lower than the national average, which means a lot of biodiversity is being lost for diminishing returns.

“Our findings demonstrate a pervasive pattern of encroachment into areas that are increasingly marginal for production but highly significant for wildlife,” Lark and his team wrote in the paper , published in Nature Communications.

Boggier areas of land, or those with uneven terrain, were traditionally left as grassland, but in the past few decades, this marginal land has also been converted. In the US, 88% of cropland expansion takes place on grassland, and much of this is happening in the Great Plains – known as America’s breadbasket – which used to be the most extensive grassland in the world.

What are the five biggest threats to biodiversity?

According to the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity there are  five main threats  to biodiversity. In descending order these are: changes in land and sea use; direct exploitation of natural resources; climate change; pollution and invasive species. 

1. For terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems, land-use change has had the largest relative negative impact on nature since 1970.  More than a third of the world’s land surface and nearly 75% of freshwater resources are now devoted to crop or livestock production. Alongside a doubling of urban area since 1992, things such as wetlands, scrubland and woodlands – which wildlife relies on – are ironed out from the landscape. 

2. The direct exploitation of organisms and non-living materials, including logging, hunting and fishing and the extraction of soils and water are all  negatively affecting ecosystems .   In marine environments, overfishing is considered to be the most serious driver of biodiversity loss. One quarter of the world’s commercial fisheries are overexploited, according to a 2005  Millennium Ecosystem Assessment . 

3. The climate crisis is dismantling ecosystems at every level. Extreme weather events such as tropical storms and flooding are destroying habitats. Warmer temperatures are also changing the timing of natural events – such as the availability of insects and when birds hatch their eggs in spring. The distribution of species and their range is also changing. 

4. Many types of pollution are increasing. In marine environments, pollution from agricultural runoff (mainly nitrogen and phosphorus) do huge damage to ecosystems. Agricultural runoff causes toxic algal blooms and even  "dead zones"  in the worst affected areas. Marine plastic pollution has increased tenfold since 1980, affecting at least 267 species.

5. Since the 17th century, invasive species have  contributed to 40%  of all known animal extinctions. Nearly one fifth of the Earth’s surface is at risk of plant and animal invasions. Invasive species change the composition of ecosystems by outcompeting native species. 

Hotspots for this expansion have included wildlife-rich grasslands in the “prairie pothole” region which stretches between Iowa, Dakota, Montana and southern Canada and is home to more than 50% of North American migratory waterfowl, as well as 96 species of songbird. This cropland expansion has wiped out about 138,000 nesting habitats for waterfowl, researchers estimate.

These grasslands are also a rich habitat for the monarch butterfly – a flagship species for pollinator conservation and a key indicator of overall insect biodiversity. More than 200m milkweed plants, the caterpillar’s only food source, were probably destroyed by cropland expansion, making it one of the leading causes for the monarch’s national decline .

The extent of conversion of grassland in the US makes it a larger emission source than the destruction of the Brazilian Cerrado , according to research from 2019 . About 90% of emissions from grassland conversion comes from carbon lost in the soil, which is released when the grassland is ploughed up.

“The rate of clearing that we’re seeing on these grasslands is on par with things like tropical deforestation, but it often receives far less attention,” says Lark.

Food crop production globally has increased by about 300% since 1970 , despite the negative environmental impacts.

Reducing food waste and eating less meat would help cut the amount of land needed for farming, while researchers say improved management of existing croplands and utilising what is already farmed as best as possible would reduce further expansion.

Lark concludes: “I think there’s a huge opportunity to re-envision our landscapes so that they’re not only providing incredible food production but also mitigating climate change and helping reduce the impacts of the biodiversity crisis by increasing habitats on agricultural land.” PW

Direct exploitation of natural resources

Groundwater extraction: ‘People don’t see it’

From hunting, fishing and logging to the extraction of oil, gas, coal and water, humanity’s insatiable appetite for the planet’s resources has devastated large parts of the natural world.

While the impacts of many of these actions can often be seen, unsustainable groundwater extraction could be driving a hidden crisis below our feet, experts have warned, wiping out freshwater biodiversity, threatening global food security and causing rivers to run dry.

Farmers and mining companies are pumping vast underground water stores at an unsustainable rate, according to ecologists and hydrologists. About half the world’s population relies on groundwater for drinking water and it helps sustain 40% of irrigation systems for crops .

The consequences for freshwater ecosystems – among the most degraded on the planet – are under-researched as studies have focused on the depletion of groundwater for agriculture.

But a growing body of research indicates that pumping the world’s most extracted resource – water – is causing significant damage to the planet’s ecosystems. A 2017 study of the Ogallala aquifer – an enormous water source underneath eight states in the US Great Plains – found that more than half a century of pumping has caused streams to run dry and a collapse in large fish populations. In 2019, another study estimated that by 2050 between 42% and 79% of watersheds that pump groundwater globally could pass ecological tipping points, without better management.

“The difficulty with groundwater is that people don’t see it and they don’t understand the fragility of it,” says James Dalton, director of the global water programme at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). “Groundwater can be the largest – and sometimes the sole – source in certain types of terrestrial habitats.

“Uganda is luxuriantly green, even during the dry season, but that’s because a lot of it is irrigated with shallow groundwater for agriculture and the ecosystems are reliant on tapping into it.”

According to UPGro (Unlocking the Potential of Groundwater for the Poor), a research programme looking into the management of groundwater in sub-Saharan Africa, 73 of the 98 operational water supply systems in Uganda are dependent on water from below ground. The country shares two transboundary aquifers: the Nile and Lake Victoria basins. At least 592 aquifers are shared across borders around the world.

“Some of the groundwater reserves are huge, so there is time to fix this,” says Dalton. “It’s just there’s no attention to it.”

Inge de Graaf, a hydrologist at Wageningen University, who led the 2019 study into watershed levels, found between 15% to 21% had already passed ecological tipping points, adding that once the effects had become clear for rivers, it was often too late.

“Groundwater is slow because it has to flow through rocks. If you extract water today, it will impact the stream flow maybe in the next five years, in the next 10 years, or in the next decades,” she says. “I think the results of this research and related studies are pretty scary.”

In April, the largest ever assessment of global groundwater wells by researchers from University of California, Santa Barbara, found that up to one in five were at risk of running dry. Scott Jasechko, a hydrologist and lead author on the paper, says that the study focuses on the consequences for humans and more research is needed on biodiversity.

“Millions of wells around the world could run dry with even modest declines in groundwater levels. And that, of course, has cascading implications for livelihoods and access to reliable and convenient water for individuals and ecosystems,” he says. PG

The climate crisis

Climate and biodiversity: ‘Solve both or solve neither’

In 2019, the European heatwave brought 43C heat to Montpellier in France. Great tit chicks in 30 nest boxes starved to death, probably because it was too hot for their parents to catch the food they needed, according to one researcher . Two years later, and 2021’s heatwave appears to have set a European record, pushing temperatures to 48.8C in Sicily in August. Meanwhile, wildfires and heatwaves are stripping the planet of life.

Until now, the destruction of habitats and extraction of resources has had a more significant impact on biodiversity than the climate crisis. This is likely to change over the coming decades as the climate crisis dismantles ecosystems in unpredictable and dramatic ways, according to a review paper published by the Royal Society.

“There are many aspects of ecosystem science where we will not know enough in sufficient time,” the paper says. “Ecosystems are changing so rapidly in response to global change drivers that our research and modelling frameworks are overtaken by empirical, system-altering changes.”

The calls for biodiversity and the climate crisis to be tackled in tandem are growing. “It is clear that we cannot solve [the global biodiversity and climate crises] in isolation – we either solve both or we solve neither,” says Sveinung Rotevatn, Norway’s climate and environment minister, with the launch in June of a report produced by the world’s leading biodiversity and climate experts. Zoological Society of London senior research fellow Dr Nathalie Pettorelli, who led a s tudy on the subject published in the Journal of Applied Ecology in September, says: “The level of interconnectedness between the climate change and biodiversity crises is high and should not be underestimated. This is not just about climate change impacting biodiversity; it is also about the loss of biodiversity deepening the climate crisis.”

Writer Zadie Smith describes every country’s changes as a “local sadness” . Insects no longer fly into the house when the lights are on in the evening, the snowdrops are coming out earlier and some migratory species, such as swallows, are starting to try to stay in the UK for winter. All these individual elements are entwined in a much bigger story of decline.

Our biosphere – the thin film of life on the surface of our planet – is being destabilised by temperature change. On land, rains are altering, extreme weather events are more common, and ecosystems more flammable. Associated changes, including flooding , sea level rise, droughts and storms, are having hugely damaging impacts on biodiversity and its ability to support us.

In the ocean, heatwaves and acidification are stressing organisms and ecosystems already under pressure due to other human activities, such as overfishing and habitat fragmentation.

The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) landmark report showed that extreme heatwaves that would usually happen every 50 years are already happening every decade. If warming is kept to 1.5C these will happen approximately every five years.

The distributions of almost half (47%) of land-based flightless mammals and almost a quarter of threatened birds, may already have been negatively affected by the climate crisis, the IPBES warns . Five per cent of species are at risk of extinction from 2C warming, climbing to 16% with a 4.3C rise.

Connected, diverse and extensive ecosystems can help stabilise the climate and will have a better chance of thriving in a world permanently altered by rising emissions, say experts. And, as the Royal Society paper says: “Rather than being framed as a victim of climate change, biodiversity can be seen as a key ally in dealing with climate change.” PW

The hidden threat of nitrogen: ‘Slowly eating away at biodiversity’

On the west coast of Scotland, fragments of an ancient rainforest that once stretched along the Atlantic coast of Britain cling on. Its rare mosses, lichens and fungi are perfectly suited to the mild temperatures and steady supply of rainfall, covering the crags, gorges and bark of native woodland. But nitrogen pollution, an invisible menace, threatens the survival of the remaining 30,000 hectares (74,000 acres) of Scottish rainforest, along with invasive rhododendron, conifer plantations and deer.

While marine plastic pollution in particular has increased tenfold since 1980 – affecting 44% of seabirds – air, water and soil pollution are all on the rise in some areas. This has led to pollution being singled out as the fourth biggest driver of biodiversity loss.

In Scotland, nitrogen compounds from intensive farming and fossil fuel combustion are dumped on the Scottish rainforest from the sky, killing off the lichen and bryophytes that absorb water from the air and are highly sensitive to atmospheric conditions.

“The temperate rainforest is far from the sources of pollution, yet because it’s so rainy, we’re getting a kind of acid rain effect,” says Jenny Hawley, policy manager at Plantlife, which has called nitrogen pollution in the air “the elephant in the room” of nature conservation. “The nitrogen-rich rain that’s coming down and depositing nitrogen into those habitats is making it impossible for the lichen, fungi, mosses and wildflowers to survive.”

Environmental destruction caused by nitrogen pollution is not limited to the Scottish rainforest. Algal blooms around the world are often caused by runoff from farming, resulting in vast dead zones in oceans and lakes that kill scores of fish and devastate ecosystems. Nitrogen-rich rainwater degrades the ability of peatlands to sequester carbon, the protection of which is a stated climate goal of several governments. Wildflowers adapted to low-nitrogen soils are squeezed out by aggressive nettles and cow parsley, making them less diverse.

About 80% of nitrogen used by humans – through food production, transport, energy and industrial and wastewater processes – is wasted and enters the environment as pollution.

“Nitrogen pollution might not result in huge floods and apocalyptic droughts but we are slowly eating away at biodiversity as we put more and more nitrogen in ecosystems,” says Carly Stevens, a plant ecologist at Lancaster University. “Across the UK, we have shown that habitats that have lots of nitrogen have fewer species in them. We have shown it across Europe. We have shown it across the US. Now we’re showing it in China. We’re creating more and more damage all the time.”

To decrease the amount of nitrogen pollution causing biodiversity loss, governments will commit to halving nutrient runoff by 2030 as part of an agreement for nature currently being negotiated in Kunming. Halting the waste of vast amounts of nitrogen fertiliser in agriculture is a key part of meeting the target, says Kevin Hicks, a senior research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute centre at York.

“One of the biggest problems is the flow of nitrogen from farming into watercourses,” Hicks says. “In terms of a nitrogen footprint, the most intensive thing that you can eat is meat. The more meat you eat, the more nitrogen you’re putting into the environment.”

Mark Sutton, a professor at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, says reducing nitrogen pollution also makes economic sense.

“Nitrogen in the atmosphere is 78% of every breath we take. It does nothing, it’s very stable and makes the sky blue. Then there are all these other nitrogen compounds: ammonia, nitrates, nitrous oxide. They create air and water pollution,” he says. He argues that if you price every kilo of nitrogen at $1 (an estimated fertiliser price), and multiply it by the amount of nitrogen pollution lost in the world – 200bn tonnes – it amounts to $200bn (£147bn) every year.

“The goal to cut nitrogen waste in half would save you $100bn,” he says. “I think $100bn a year is a worthwhile saving.” PG

• Invasive species

The problem for islands: ‘We have to be very careful’

On Gough Island in the southern Atlantic Ocean, scores of seabird chicks are eaten by mice every year. The rodents were accidentally introduced by sailors in the 19th century and their population has surged, putting the Tristan albatross – one of the largest of its species – at risk of extinction along with dozens of rare seabirds. Although Tristan albatross chicks are 300 times the size of mice, two-thirds did not fledge in 2020 largely because of the injuries they sustained from the rodents, according to the RSPB .

The situation on the remote island, 2,600km from South Africa, is a grisly warning of the consequences of the human-driven impacts of invasive species on biodiversity. An RSPB-led operation to eradicate mice from the British overseas territory has been completed, using poison to help save the critically endangered albatross and other bird species from injuries they sustain from the rodents. It will be two years before researchers can confirm whether or not the plan has worked. But some conservationists want to explore another controversial option whose application is most advanced in the eradication of malaria : gene drives.

Instead of large-scale trapping or poisoning operations, which have limited effectiveness and can harm other species, gene drives involve introducing genetic code into an invasive population that would make them infertile or all one gender over successive generations. The method has so far been used only in a laboratory setting but at September’s IUCN congress in Marseille, members backed a motion to develop a policy on researching its application and other uses of synthetic biology for conservation.

“If a gene drive were proven to be effective and there were safety mechanisms to limit its deployment, you would introduce multiple individuals on an island whose genes would be inherited by other individuals in the population,” says David Will, an innovation programme manager with Island Conservation , a non-profit dedicated to preventing extinctions by removing invasive species from islands. “Eventually, you would have either an entirely all male or entirely all female population and they would no longer be able to reproduce.”

Nearly one-fifth of the Earth’s surface is at risk of plant and animal invasions and although the problem is worldwide, such as feral pigs wreaking havoc in the southern United States and lionfish in the Mediterranean , islands are often worst affected. The global scale of the issue will be revealed in a UN scientific assessment in 2023.

“We have to be very careful,” says Austin Burt, a professor of evolutionary genetics at Imperial College London, who researches how gene drives can be used to eradicate malaria in mosquito populations. “If you’re going after mice, for example, and you’re targeting mice on an island, you’d need to make sure that none of those modified mice got off the island to cause harm to the mainland population.”

In July, scientists announced they had successfully wiped out a population of malaria-transmitting mosquitoes using a gene drive in a laboratory setting, raising the prospect of self-destructing mosquitoes being released into the wild in the next decade.

Kent Redford, chair of the IUCN Task Force on Synthetic Biology who led an assessment of the use of synthetic biology in conservation, said there are clear risks and opportunities in the field but further research is necessary.

“None of these genetic tools are ever going to be a panacea. Ever. Nor do I think they will ever replace the existing tools,” Redford says, adding: “There is a hope – and I stress hope – that engineered gene drives have the potential to effectively decrease the population sizes of alien invasive species with very limited knock-on effects on other species.” PG

Find more age of extinction coverage here , and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on Twitter for all the latest news and features

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Twenty Key Challenges in Environmental and Resource Economics

• Open access
• Published: 16 October 2020
• Volume 77 , pages 725–750, ( 2020 )

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• Lucas Bretschger 1 &
• Karen Pittel 2  

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Economic and ecological systems are closely interlinked at a global and a regional level, offering a broad variety of important research topics in environmental and resource economics. The successful identification of key challenges for current and future research supports development of novel theories, empirical applications, and appropriate policy designs. It allows establishing a future-oriented research agenda whose ultimate goal is an efficient, equitable, and sustainable use of natural resources. Based on a normative foundation, the paper aims to identify fundamental topics, current trends, and major research gaps to motivate further development of academic work in the field.

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1 Introduction

1.1 research frontier.

The research agenda in environmental and resource economics has always been very broad and dynamic, reflecting the ways our economies interact with the natural environment. While in classical economics of the eighteenth century the factor land played a dominant role, the effects of pollution externalities, resource scarcities, ecosystem services, and sustainability became important in subsequent time periods. These issues have triggered different waves of research with very prominent results, specifically on optimal policies in the presence of externalities (Pigou 1920 ), optimal extraction of non-renewable resources (Hotelling 1931 ), optimal capital accumulation in the presence of resource scarcities (Dasgupta and Heal 1974 ), and sustainable development (Hartwick 1977 ; Pearce et al. 1994 ). Of course, the list of topics has already been very diverse in the past but has increasingly become so with recent global environmental problems challenging the functioning of a world economy which is growing at a high rate and heavily relies on an international division of labour and trade.

In the past, new research challenges emerged and manifested in different ways: Some topical fields became increasingly relevant due to new technological developments, new ecological or societal challenges or new political agendas. Others arose in fields that were already well researched but rose in importance. Not all challenges were of a topical nature. In some fields, we found our methodological tool-kit not equipped to deal with new problems or in need of extension to find new (and better) answers to old questions. At the same time, it has become increasingly clear that we have to reach out to other disciplines to meet new and often immense challenges. In environmental economics it is key to seek a good balance between disciplinary excellence, interdisciplinary collaboration, and political impact.

Environmental and resource economics is a dynamic field, in which new key topics emerge frequently. So, while the topical and methodological challenges that the paper identifies will be important for some time to come, they will and should also be subject to further development over the next years and decades. The paper aims to identify and address the variety of new complex problems generated by humans when they exploit natural resources and the environment. We specifically identify Twenty Challenges that we feel will be important for environmental and resource economists to address. We are aware that such a list will never be unanimously agreed upon and we do not even lay claim on the list being complete; the next section provides a background to the compilation of the list. Nevertheless, we feel it to be important to (at best) point researchers in directions important to work in in the future or (at least) to launch a new—controversial but productive—discussion on the development of our field. In any case, the paper should support the profession to operate at the research frontier generating novel theories, empirical designs, and workable policies. But, before we turn to the Twenty Challenges , we aim to motivate the framing of research in our field—past, present and future.

1.2 Identification of Research Challenges

To provide a normative foundation for our research agenda we characterize our underlying assumptions and generalized views on the nature of research in the field. This set of basic assumptions motivates the criteria of importance, activeness, and distinction of the selected topics as well as our choices with respect to design, methodology and research methods. Identifying the relevant issues, i.e. the mere choice of what to study in environmental economics imposes specific values on the subjects. In our view, the guiding principle in the normative framework is that environmental economics differs from general economics by its ontology, i.e. the system of belief that reflects the interpretation of what constitutes an important fact. It is a deep and serious concern about the state of the natural environment that drives the economic analysis of ecological processes. Nature is not simply part of the economic system but a different system with its own very complex regularities and dynamics; ecosystem values are not reducible to market exchange values. The task to integrate the ecological and economic systems to a holistic framework in an appropriate manner and to derive valid guidelines for the economy under the restrictions imposed by the environment lies at the heart of our research. Central parts of the ontology are the valuation of ecosystems, the increasing scarcities in natural resources and sinks, the effects of environmental externalities, the long-term orientation of planning, an important role of uncertainty, and the existence of irreversible processes. The anthropocentric view and the use of utilitarianism do not imply that individuals are purely self-centered and narrowly selfish. It highlights the indistinguishable role of human decision making for the future of the planet and aims at decision making that cares for efficiency, equity, and posterity. Based on a broad utilitarian setup, growth is not valued in terms of material consumption but in terms of wellbeing, which includes elements like social preferences, work-life balance, appreciation of nature etc. Posterity reflects our care for future generations, whose welfare should not be harmed by the activities of current generations. Fundamental changes of the economy e.g. the phase-out of fossil fuels, includes policy-induced decrease of activities, a role for technology, substitutability in production and consumption, a decoupling from natural resource use, and internalizing cost to correct market failures. Substantive transitions are very difficult to implement, as important lock-in mechanisms such as habit persistence, built infrastructure, and supporting policies such as subsidies stabilize current practices. To achieve a change of mindset in politics to achieve a transition to a green economy is a difficult task. A fundamental systems change, as discussed by many these days, is undoubtedly much more complex to accomplish; its impacts are uncertain and may delay the necessary steps which are important to rapidly improve the state of our ecosystems.

We acknowledge that one can always challenge an ontological position because it reflects ethical principles. In our research agenda there is no external reality, independent of what we may think or understand it to be. We reduce economic and ecological complexity through our personal system of belief to design our preferred map, which by definition is not the territory. In his survey of ecological research issues for the economists, Ehrlich ( 2008 ) refers to his ”own mental meta-analysis” to motivate his choices and to alert us to the importance of research on big issues like the meaning of life, mortality, and death. At the same time, he acknowledges that the emergence of pervasive new environmental problems, such as climate change and biodiversity loss, requires to flexibly adjust research programs to societal demand. Adjustments of the agenda may also be supply driven, when new methods allow for more effective engagement with important issues like risk and uncertainty or assessment of empirical regularities with superior estimation methods.

1.3 Forming a Research Agenda

Environmental economics is closely linked to general economics in its epistemology, i.e. the validity, scope and methods of acquiring knowledge by using models, distinguishing between positive and normative models, and testing hypotheses with empirical methods and experiments. An important cornerstone for economic research has always been the analysis of economic efficiency. Since the early days of environmental economics research, this has also held for our field whether it concerned the efficiency in the use of natural resources or the design of policies. Although research in our field has become much more interdisciplinary and policy-oriented, this still constitutes common ground. It is still a prime duty of the economist to point at the potentially vast allocative inefficiencies of the use of natural resources in pure market economies. Efficiency is a necessary condition for optimal states of the economic-ecological system and the foundation for policies maximizing social welfare.

The pursuit of optimality has to be complemented by a requirement to take care of equity and posterity enabling sustainability of development. In this long-run perspective, economics has to highlight the substitution effect as a powerful mechanism establishing consistency between humanity and its natural environment. Substitution comes in many guises, e.g. as substitution between clean and dirty production, renewable and exhaustible resources, extractive and conservationist attitude, pollution intensive and extensive consumption, etc. This dynamic analysis is crucial in many respects. It has recently been included at all levels of research in the fields. The same holds for the issue of risk and uncertainty, a pervasive topic when dealing with the environment.

In many cases, there has been a significant discrepancy between the theoretical derivation of social optima in academia and the attempts to foster their implementation under realistic policy conditions. As a consequence, policies dealing with environmental issues have been of very different quality and effectiveness. The reduction of acid rains, the protection of the ozone layer, and cutbacks of particulate matter emissions in many world regions were among the prominent successes. Global warming, extraction of rare earth elements, and loss of biodiversity are not yet addressed in a comprehensive manner. Political resistance against the protection of nature often refers to the economic costs of policies, including the concerns of growth reduction, employment loss, and adverse effect on income distribution. The lack of success in many policy areas has led to reformulation and extension of the research agenda. In the future, research should focus more on strengthening the links between theory and policy.

Our selection of the Twenty Challenges is also based on the potential of research in these areas to contribute and leverage social welfare and sustainable development. We specifically look for areas that are either inherently new to the research agenda in environmental and resource economics or in which research stagnates. We present the challenges in a specific order and like to highlight the links between them before we enter into the details. The aim of net zero carbon emission by the mid of the century dominates current policy debates and unites basically all important elements of our discipline; it thus constitutes a good starting point. Decarbonization necessarily involves a deep understanding of systems dynamics and of risk and resilience, which are presented next. An important and not sufficiently addressed research issue is the emergence of disruptive development during a substantive transition, the next challenge for our research. Extending the scope, we then address human and government behaviour. In the context of environmental policy, the popular and sometimes underrated request of an equitable use of the environment has emerged as a dominant topic, a next issue for further research. As natural capital involves many more elements than the climate, biodiversity and general ecosystem services are included in the sequence. Broadening the scope to the big problems of human behaviour with natural resources we then turn to political conflicts, population development and conflicting land use. Shifting the focus on induced movements of the labour force we go on by dealing with environmental migration and urbanization. These affect welfare of the individuals in a major way, like health and the epidemiological environment as a next research challenge. In terms of the reorganization of the transition to a green economy we highlight the central role of finance and the implementation of new measures in the dominant energy sector. The final three research challenges are motivated by advances in the methodology. Big data and machine learning offer new perspectives in sustainability research, refined methods and increasing experience improve our simulation models and structural assessment modelling, which forms the last three challenges of our list.

1.4 Links to Current Research

In order to put our agenda into a broader perspective and to concretize the selected challenges, we believe it is important to show the relationship between our research agenda and the priorities in current literature and policy debates. We have considered three main links. First, we conducted a quantitative and qualitative literature review and analyzed current research as presented at international conferences (World Conference of Environmental and Resource Economics in 2018, the SURED conference in 2018, Meetings of the American, European, and Asian Associations of Environmental and Resource Economics in 2019). The aim of this analysis was to see where our profession moves and which of the currently hotly debated topics offers a high potential for future research. Second, we took the discussions in interdisciplinary research fora into consideration to identify further fields that are of high importance for future resource use, sustainable development and environmental outcomes but have so far not been adequately addressed from an economics perspective. Information on this research was gained through interdisciplinary research initiatives (for example The Belmont Forum, Future Earth and National Research Funding Activities). Involvement in interdisciplinary and globally oriented research councils provided further access to the discussions in other disciplines. Third, we draw conclusions from current policies and news as well as our involvement in the policy arena. The authors are involved in a number of institutionalized policy-oriented activities on the regional, national and international level (Regional Climate Councils, National Climate Policy Platforms as well as the UN climate negotiations).

The paper relates to similar contributions in recent literature. Based on citation data Auffhammer ( 2009 ) identifies important topics and scholars and provides a brief historical overview of the discipline from exhaustible and renewable resources to sustainability, pollution control, development, international trade, climate change, international agreements, and non-market valuation. Polyakov et al. ( 2018 ) analyze authorship patterns using text analysis for classification of articles in Environmental and Resource Economics. Based on 1630 articles published in the Journal from 1991 to 2015 they document the importance of applied and policy-oriented content in the field. They identify non-market valuation, recreation and amenity, and conservation, as popular topics and growing when measured by both number of articles and citations. Costanza et al. ( 2016 ) investigate the most influential publications of Ecological Economics in terms of citation counts both within the journal itself and elsewhere. Important topics turn out to be social aspects of environmental economics and policy, valuation of environmental policy, governance, technical change, happiness and poverty, and ecosystem services. A contemporary analysis of how research issues have developed in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management in the time of its existence is provided by Kubea et al. ( 2018 ). These authors show that the sample of topics has broadened from the core issues of non-market valuation, cost-benefit analysis, natural resource economics, and environmental policy instruments to a more diversified array of research areas, with climate change and energy issues finding their way into the journal. In addition, increasing methodological plurality becomes apparent. They conclude that energy, development, and health are on the rise and that natural resources, instrument choice, and non-market valuation will endure; multidisciplinary work will be increasingly important. An excellent survey on research in the central field of sustainable development is provided in Polasky et al. ( 2019 ), which explicitly shows where the collaboration between economists and the other disciplines is currently insufficient and how it should be intensified in the future.

Regarding the literature that we connect our Twenty Challenges to, we naturally face the problem that some challenges have so far not been addressed adequately in the (economics) literature. In these cases we also reference papers from other disciplines. We, however, also take basic literature and recent research in environmental and resource economics into account. As we often deal with emerging topics, we cite some of this work even when not yet published. In other cases, where future research can build on or learn from past research, we also go back in time and reference older papers. Ultimately, neither our list of challenges nor the literature we base our analysis on will be satisfying to everybody. Our selection cannot be comprehensive and does not claim to be. But the specific task to identify future-oriented topics ultimately lasts on a subjective individual assessment of the authors. Nevertheless, hopefully it imparts impulses for future research in the different subfields of environmental and resource economics.

2 Twenty Challenges

The ordering of the following challenges should not be understood to perfectly reflect their individual importance (beyond what we explained in the previous sections). Also, many of the fields discussed are inherently related, creating some unavoidable overlap. We feel that efforts to bring the challenges into some complete ’natural order’ are not only doomed to fail but also would not do them justice as they relate to very different areas and can/should not be weighed against each other. Also, attempting to show their interrelations would result in a 20-by-20 matrix that would not provide more clarity.

Deep decarbonization and climate neutrality To limit global warming to a maximum of 1.5 degrees Celsius, a state of net zero greenhouse gas emissions—i.e. climate neutrality—should be reached by the mid of the century (IPCC 2018 ). The directly following and unprecedented challenge is to decarbonize the global economy in very a narrow time window (Hainsch et al. 2018 ). This holds especially as the threshold for 1.5 degrees is expected to be passed around 2040 (IPCC 2018 ). Countries must increase their NDC ambitions of the Paris Agreement more than fivefold to achieve the 1.5 degree goal (UN - United Nations 2019 ). The time window for necessary decisions is closing fast. Infrastructure that is installed today often has a life span that reaches until and beyond 2050. Decisions on investments today therefore affect the ability to reach climate targets not only in 2030 but also 2050 and beyond. And while the necessity of reaching net zero emissions by mid century is reflected by, e.g., the European Commission’ Green Deal, much uncertainty remains regarding its implementation. This holds to an even larger extent with respect to other countries and regions. The fundamental challenge is to better understand economically viable deep decarbonization paths and then to implement incentives for input substitution, technology development, and structural change. More specifically, the vision of these policies has to be long-term and reach beyond phasing out coal and increasing energy efficiency. However, despite recent research efforts in climate economics, many issues around decarbonization, negative emissions and economic development are still controversial or insufficiently understood by economists. Specifically, industry applications for which alternative technologies are not available yet as well as agricultural emissions will have to be addressed. Also, the later greenhouse gas emissions start to fall, the faster their decline will have to ultimately be in order not to overshoot temperature targets (Agliardi and Xepapadeas 2018 ), leading to an increased need for negative emissions. However, potential trade-offs and synergies in the use of land for negative emission technologies, food production and biodiversity are still underresearched. Identifying technologies today that are the most promising in the very long run is subject to high uncertainty. Yet, while investing too early might be costly, delaying investment might cost even more or might lead to a weakening of future climate targets (Gerlagh and Michielsen 2015 ). Also, transition processes may involve strong scale effects implying nonlinear development of abatement cost. Once certain thresholds are reached, lower abatement cost or even disruptive development completely altering the production process could emerge in a later phase of decarbonization. Given the dramatic increase needed in mitigation efforts to reach the 1.5 or even 2 degree target, more attention also has to be devoted to the question of adaptation. Until today, the focus of research as well as policy has been primarily on mitigation rather than adaptation, partially because of expected substitution effects between mitigation and adaptation and partially because adaptation was taken to be automatic (Fankhauser 2017 ). However, as Fankhauser lays out “knowledge gaps, behavioral barriers, and market failures that hold back effective adaptation and require policy intervention”. All of these topics present a wide scope for substantial further research.

Dynamics of the economic-ecological system Depletion of exhaustible resources, harvesting of renewable resources, recycling of raw materials, and accumulation of pollution stocks require basic societal decisions which are of an inherently dynamic nature. Whether the world society will be able to enjoy constant or increasing living standards under such dynamic natural constraints depends on another dynamic process, which is the accumulation of man-made capital. To derive the precise laws of motion in all the stock variables is challenging because general solutions of dynamic systems with several states are usually hard to obtain. An adequate procedure to obtain closed-form solutions may be to link several stocks in a reasonable way, e.g. when simultaneously dealing with resource, pollution, and capital stocks (Peretto 2017 ; Bretschger 2017b ). The specific challenge is then to find the best possible economic justification to motivate the links. One may also focus on a few stocks which are considered the main drivers of economic development and sustainable growth on a global scale (Marin and Vona 2019 ; Borissov et al. 2019 ). When resorting to numerical simulation methods it is a main challenge to provide basic economic results which are sufficiently robust and supported by ample economic intuition. Social-ecological systems are increasingly understood as complex adaptive systems. Essential features of these systems - such as nonlinear feedbacks, strategic interactions, individual and spatial heterogeneity, and varying time scales—pose another set of substantial challenges for modeling in a dynamic framework. A main challenge is the characterization and selection of dynamic paths with multiple equilibria and the overall tractablility of the models, given the diversity of interlinkages and nonlinear relationships. The complexity of economic-ecological systems lead to a main challenge for designing effective policies is taking account of network effects, strategic interaction, sectoral change, path dependencies, varying time lags, and nonlinear feedbacks have to be considered as well as different regional and temporal scales, interdependencies between ecosystems, institutional restrictions and distributional implications (see, e.g., Engel et al. 2008 ; Levin et al. 2013 ; Vatn 2010 ). Optimal policies should also acknowledge the balance between the preservation of the ecology and the development of the economy especially for countries growing out of poverty. Setting a price for ecosystem services and natural capital via policy is important for preventing innovation incentives from being skewed against maintaining natural capital and ecosystem services.

Risk, uncertainty, and resilience The vast majority of contributions in environmental economics use models with a purely deterministic structure. However, large negative environmental events require a completely different framework, which poses specific challenges for modelling. Heatwaves, floods, droughts, and hurricanes are shocks that are very uncertain, arriving at irregular times and with varying intensity. Also, risk and uncertainty about socio-economic impacts and technological development affect the optimal design of policies (see, e.g., Jensen and Traeger 2014 ). Moreover, uncertainty changes the political economy of climate policy and, finally, regulatory and policy uncertainty might create obstacles to reach climate targets through, for example, distortions of investment decisions (Pommeret and Schubert 2018 ; Bretschger and Soretz 2018 ). Stern ( 2016 ) argued forcefully that climate economics research needs to better integrate risk and uncertainty. Bigger disasters or so-called ”tipping points” such as the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, the collapse of Atlantic thermohaline circulation, and the dieback of Amazon rainforest involve an even higher level of uncertainty (Lenton and Ciscar 2013 ) with implications for optimal policy design and capital accumulation (Van der Ploeg and de Zeeuw 2018 ). Understanding the implications of tipping points is further complicated as the different tipping points are not independent of each other (Cai et al. 2016 ). The Economy and the Earth system both form non-deterministic systems; combining the two in an overarching framework and adding institutions for decision making multiplies the degree of complexity for adequate modelling and methods (Athanassoglou and Xepapadeas 2012 ). It is thus a main challenge for further research to provide analytic foundations and policy rules for rational societal decision-making under the conditions of risk and uncertainty up to deep uncertainty (Brock and Xepapadeas 1903 ; Baumgärtner and Engler 2018 ). Future work on policy design under deep uncertainty can build on a wide range of literature ranging from the assessment of the precautionary principle in this context to the fundamental contributions by Hansen and Sargent ( 2001 ) and Klibanoff et al. ( 2005 ) as well as on more recent analyses in the context of environmental and resource economics, e.g. Manoussi et al. ( 2018 ). An important challenge of the environmental discipline is to provide a framework for the global economy providing the conditions for resilience against major shocks and negative environmental events (Bretschger and Vinogradova 2018 ). With deep uncertainty one has to generate rules for deep resilience. Including uncertainty is especially important when environmental events do not occur constantly but cause the crossing of tipping points involving large and sudden shifts. Economic modeling needs to increasingly incorporate tipping points and the value of resilience in theory and to generate and use data supporting the empirical validity. The combination of uncertainty and potential irreversible outcomes (e.g., species extinction) is another big challenge for research.

Disruptive development and path dependencies Substantial and sometimes disruptive changes in behavioral patterns, economic structure and technologies will be required if net zero GHG emissions and the UN sustainable development goals are to be reached. On the bright side, development may exhibit favorable disruptions. Consumers’ preferences and political pressure coupled with new technology achievements may alter certain sectors in a short period of time. Similar to the communication industry which has completely changed, transportation and heat generation could and mst probably will undergo fundamental changes in the near future. The research challenge here is to provide adequate models predicting and adequately analyzing such important transitions and to highlight resisting forces at the same time. In fact, the change of trajectories in development is often hampered by technological, economic and behavioral lock-ins, resulting in path dependencies and inertia. In such situations, history influences current development through, for example, past investment in R&D, the size of established markets, increasing returns or habits acquired (Aghion et al. 2016 ; Barnes et al. 2004 ; Arthur 1989 ). Behavioral path dependencies affect acceptance and adoption of new technologies, hinder social innovation and might render policies aimed at marginal changes ineffective. They can thus postpone the transition to a low-carbon economy, harm efforts in biodiversity conservation and prolong unsustainable resource use patterns and lifestyles, even if they are welfare enhancing in the long-run (e.g. Acemoglu et al. 2012 ; Kalkuhl et al. 2012 ). Inertia and lock-ins may also be policy driven with, for example, political or economics elites trying to block change (Acemoglu and Robinson 2006 ) or clean energy support schemes fostering new technology lock-ins. Whether disruption or a lock-in emerges depends, for example, on expectations determining the steady state of an economy (Bretschger and Schaefer 2017 ). This requires nonlinearities e.g. in capital return, generating overlap regions in which the growth path is indeterminate and could be either driven by history or by expectations. The challenge is to add more substantial research into system dynamics and the political economy of change, to gain a better understanding of the different mechanisms responsible for inertia and disruptive change. So far, the role of path dependencies has often been neglected in empirical as well as theoretical analyses (Calel and Dechezlepretre 2016 ). Also, understanding the triggers or tipping points for disruptive change can help to identify policies that have a big environmental impact with moderate costs in terms of environmental policy.

Behavioral environmental economics Traditionally, economics focuses predominantly on the supply side when analyzing potentials and challenges for environmental policies. Preferences of individuals are mostly assumed to be given with economic analysis confining itself to studying the effects of changing incentives and altering constraints. The change and development of preferences over time plays only a comparative minor role for economic research. Also, the follow-up question whether policies should be allowed to tamper with preferences is rarely discussed with nudging being one big exception to this rule (e.g. Strassheim and Beck 2019 ). While the traditional, supply-side oriented analysis has provided powerful results in positive analysis, it proves to be limited in a field which inherently includes normative conclusions like environmental economics. The path toward sustainable development requires behavioral changes and political actions changing our relationship to the environment. Ultimately, environmental policies have to be decided by the same people overusing the environment in the absence of a policy. In situations where outcomes are inefficient because individuals and political actors follow their own self-interest and ignore external costs and benefits of their actions, it is clearly not sufficient for economists to advocate the implementation of environmental policies. It is crucial to understand under what conditions preferences change and agents support green policies (Casari and Luini 2009 ). So, the challenge to economic research is to better understand the evolution of green attitudes, the emergence of preferences for a clean environment, and expectations in the case of multiple equilibria (Cerda Planas 2018 ). The formation and development of preferences is also not independent from cultural, regional and community aspects. Research that ignores heterogeneity among actors or the role of social and group dynamics and only relies on the traditional, isolated analysis of individual preferences is likely to lead to an incomplete understanding of preference dynamics. As the example of discounting shows, the social context has an impact on myopic attitudes and the motivation to undertake sacrifices for a cleaner future (Galor and Özak 2016 ). Also, attention to behavioral details, that economists might find rather uninteresting from a research perspective, might influence effectiveness of policies tremendously (Duflo 2017 ). Especially with the natural environment, the choice and guise of policy instruments should take these mechanisms into account.

Institutional analysis of environmental policy Virtually every contribution to the environmental and resource economics literature culminates in one or several policy conclusions. However, these results are often received with skepticism from industry and public. Therefore, a continuing key challenge for our profession is a thorough understanding of environmental policy institutions, processes and decision-making; this task has become even more important given the enormous scale and global nature of future policies. Research in this area has, however, the advantage of already looking back on a long tradition (see e.g. the body of work by Daniel Bromley, e.g. Bromley 1989 ). Well-designed institutions support and create incentives to drive development toward a welfare-improving state. Absent, weak, inefficient, or even corrupt governments and institutions are detrimental to successful environmental policy (Pellegrini and Gerlagh 2008 ; Dasgupta and De Cian 2016 ) or might lead to detrimental effects of resource wealth (see Badeeb et al. 2017 for an overview of the related literature). To effectively increase social welfare by, for example, conservation of ecological services, one has to design policies in a way that allow implementation under realistic policy conditions (Rodrik 2008 ). Pure reference to the construct of a social planner is not sufficient. For increasing efficiency in problem solving, the ex-post evaluation of policies has to be expanded and improved. Policy evaluation should not only analyze if regulatory objectives have been reached but also which side-effects arise (OECD 2017 ). Moreover, the comparison with alternative measures and a continuous international exchange of best practices have to be supported by science. A proactive environmental policy analysis should furthermore include studying vested interests, lobbying, political power, policy communication, and voting behavior. Especially insights from behavioral economics may add to our understanding of a proper design of environmental institutions. On the international level, the adequate institutional design for global environmental policy still poses great challenges. Beyond traditional research fields like international environmental agreements in specific areas like climate change, the multi-dimensionality of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) and potential trade-offs between different goals need to be explored further. This holds especially given the vast differences in income, vulnerability, and resilience between countries, as well as the need for unanimity and voluntary contributions on the UN level. Relating national to international policies has the potential to be especially rewarding in this context given the SDGs relevance for and acceptance in national as well as international politics. Insights from the analysis of institutions in traditional economic sectors (e.g. on the efficiency of capital markets) should be transferred and applied to the global level (e.g. with respect to investment in the world’s natural capital stock).

Equitable use of the environment We place equity and fairness in dealing with the natural environment on the priority list of our challenges because first and foremost equity is a central requirement for sustainability of development. By definition, sustainable development seeks an equitable treatment across different generations as well as agents living today. We also believe that for successful environmental policies, equity and fairness are crucial complements to the dominant efficiency requirement (Sterner 2011 ). It is a specific challenge of our field to study equity in an economic context and to demonstrate its importance for sustainability to mainstream economics and the public. The first aspect of the problem is the aforementioned unequal vulnerability of countries to environmental changes such as global warming. If vulnerability is higher in less developed countries, the equity perspective is especially striking. As a matter of fact, most of the climate vulnerable countries have a low average income. Global environmental policy is then motivated not only by efficiency but also by the aim of preventing increasing inequalities (Bretschger 2017a ). Global efforts are also indicated to avoid adverse feedback effects of induced inequalities like environmental migration. The second aspect is that acceptance of public policies sharply increases with the perceived fairness of the measure (Pittel and Rübbelke 2011 ; IPCC 2018 ). In the past, economists have often underestimated political resistance against efficient environmental protection, which was mostly related to negative impacts on income distribution. Take carbon pricing and emission regulation as a current example. Although evidence from cross-country studies suggests that regressivity of carbon pricing is much less frequent than often assumed in the public (Parry 2015 ), the perceived distributional impact is often very different (Beck et al. 2016 ). Therefore the impact of environmental policies on income groups, regions, and countries should be better integrated in our analysis and policy recommendations. Where efficient policies are regressive, economists have to evaluate and propose alternative or complementary policy designs. Benefits and costs need to be disaggregated by group (country) with a special attention on the poorest members of society (countries). Internationally, equity concerns need to be addressed especially in situations where the entire world benefits from the protection of natural capital and ecosystem services in poor countries (e.g., of carbon sinks and biodiversity hubs like tropical rain forests). The experience with the REDD+ process shows the complexity of designing such international approaches to incentivize and enable developing countries to protect these global public goods. More economic analysis is needed on all of the above aspects, giving rise to a rich research agenda in theory and applied work.

Loss of biodiversity and natural capital The rate of species extinction today is estimated to be up to 1000 times higher than without human interference (Rockstrom 2009 ). Human activities impact biodiversity through land use change, pollution, habit fragmentation and the introduction of non-native species but also increasingly through climate change and its interaction with already existing drivers of biodiversity change (IPCC 2002 ). In view of this, biodiversity conservation has long been a focus of politics. In 1992, the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity main objectives were stated as ”the conservation of biological diversity, the sustainable use of its components and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic resources” (UN - United Nations 1992 ). Yet, although economists have developed conceptual and theoretical frameworks addressing the valuation of biodiversity (Weitzman 1998 ; Brock and Xepapadeas 2003 ) and despite data on valuation having become increasingly available (see, e.g. TEEB 2020 ), Weitzman ( 2014 ) points out, that an objective or even widely agreed measure of biodiversity and its value is still missing. The same holds for an underlying theory framework and a comprehensive measure of natural capital that not only includes biodiversity but also its links to regulating services (e.g., pollution abatement, land protection), material provisioning services (e.g., food, energy, materials), and nonmaterial services (e.g., aesthetics, experience, learning, physical and mental health, recreation). How biodiversity and natural capital should be measured, which societal, political and economic values underlie different measures and valuation and how ecological and economical trade-offs should be dealt with are big challenges left for future research. In order to address these issues, not only do we need to develop appropriate assessment methods, but we also need to disclose the theoretical basics of this assessment and which trade-offs go hand in hand with different assessments (Brei et al. 2020 ; Antoci et al. 2019 ; Drupp 2018 ). Completely new issues for the valuation of biodiversity and natural capital arise with the development of new technologies. Take DSI (digital sequence information), for example. DSI are digital images of genetic resources (DNA) that can be stored in databases. This gives rise not only to new challenges regarding their valuation but also about the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilization of these resources.

Valuing and paying for ecosystem services Related to the question of biodiversity valuation is the market and non-market valuation of ecosystem services in general and the adequate design of payment for ecosystem services (PES). Overall, research on ecosystem services valuation has made significant progress in the last decades. Nevertheless, challenges remain even in traditional valuation fields (for example, valuation of non-use or interconnected ecosystems). Other, so far underresearched areas that constitute promising fields for future research are health-related valuation aspects (Bratman et al. 2019 ) and nonmaterial ecosystem services, such as amenities of landscapes or cultural ecosystem services (Small et al. 2017 ; James 2015 ). Also, data availability remains a problem in many valuation areas. Although digitized observation and information systems offer large potentials for previously unknown data access, they also raise a whole slew of new ethical, privacy as well as economic questions, especially in areas like health. While a lot of progress has been made in the valuation of ecosystem services, their impact on decision making still lags behind. One factor contributing to this disconnect are prevalent mismatches between regional and temporal scales of economic, institutional and ecological systems that make valuation and policy design complex (Schirpke et al. 2019 ). The challenge is to develop combined natural science-economic models that allow better insights into how changes in economic systems lead to changes in the flows of ecosystem services and vice versa (Verburg et al. 2016 ). This requires a deep understanding of ecological and economic systems as well as other aspects like technologies, regional heterogeneity and system boundaries, i.e. catastrophic events. It also raises classic economic problems, such as choosing an appropriate discount rate and degree of risk aversion. Regarding tools to include ecosystem services in economic decision making, PES are a, by now, well-established (Salzman et al. 2018 ) and also quite well-researched approach for promoting environmental outcomes. Still, the literature has identified a number of aspects to be addressed in the design of PES to make them more effective as well as efficient and to simultaneously improve social outcomes (Wunder et al. 2018 ; Chan et al. 2017 ). A promising area of research rarely addressed are PES to preserve transboundary or global ecosystem services through international payment schemes (for example, in tropical forest preservation). While some work has been done on the conceptual level (e.g. Harstad 2012 ), the REDD+ process (Maniatis et al. 2019 ) and the failure of the Yasuni initiative (Sovacool and Scarpaci 2016 ) show the complexity of such approaches for which a thorough economics analysis is still missing.

Conflicts over natural resources Climate change and decarbonization transform regional and global geopolitical landscapes and might give rise to future domestic as well as international conflicts (Mach et al. 2019 ; Carleton and Hsiang 2016 ). First, decarbonization changes the role of resources and of resource- and energy-related infrastructures. Climate policies affect the rent allocation between different fossil fuels like, for example, coal and natural gas, but might also change the overall rent level (Kalkuhl and Brecha 2013 ). Asset stranding can endanger stability in resource (rent) dependent countries. Conflicts may also arise over materials critical to new, low-carbon energy technologies like rare earth elements but also over access to sustainable energy (Goldthau et al. 2019 ; O’Sullivan et al. 2017 ). Further research is needed to design policies that are better equipped to reduce the vulnerability of economies to changes in resource availability and resource rents. This opens up challenges for future research, especially as restrictions from very diverse institutional capacities have to be considered to render policies efficient and effective. Second, climate change will affect the ability to meet basic human needs through food, land and water. Sulemanaa et al. ( 2019 ) find a positive effect of the occurrence of temperature extremes on conflict incidence. They stress the need for more advanced spatial econometric models to identify effects that are transmitted across space. More research is also needed on the role of institutions and interaction with other phenomena like population dynamics, migration, and environmental degradation. Currently, the role of climate for conflict is still small compared to other causes, many linkages between conflicts and climate change as well as other factors promoting conflict are still uncertain (Mach et al. 2019 ). The challenge to economic research is to get early insights into the nexus of historical and cultural factors, vested interests, population dynamics and climate change in order to help to prevent resource-related conflicts.

Population development and use of the environment Already since antiquity, demographic analysis has been a central topic of human thinking. With the Malthusian predictions of catastrophes caused by population growth, the topic is firmly related to the natural environment and the limits of planet Earth. While limited food production was the dominant topic in the 18th century, the impact of world population on global commons, availability of renewable and exhaustible resources, and ecosystem services have been dominant topics in the last decades. Still, while it is often argued in the public and in natural sciences that world population size should be a concern because of ecological constraints, economics has largely left the topic on the side; the few exceptions (Peretto and Valente 2015 ) and (Bretschger 2013 , 2020 ) point in a different direction, namely the compatibility of population growth and sustainable development under very general conditions. Current trends of demographic transition show significant signs of population degrowth for leading economies while trends for developing countries vary substantially (UN - United Nations 2019 ). Population is forecasted to expand especially in Africa, accounting for more than half of the world’s population growth over the coming decades, raising questions about the effect of this population increase on fragile ecosystems, resource use and ultimately the potential for sustainable growth (African Development Bank 2015 ). Population growth will also promote further urbanization and migration triggered by environmental and resource depletion but also giving rise to new environmental problems (Awumbila 2017 ). Challenges from population development and environment are thus closely linked to the other research topics highlighted in this article. However, population growth is not exogenously given but determined by economic, social as well as environmental factors. Education and income or economic development have long been established as crucial for fertility (see e.g. the reviews of the literature provided by Kan and Lee 2018 ; Fox et al. 2019 ). To integrate these findings into a holistic approach is a mediating challenge for future research. Climate change might affect these channels in different ways, potentially exacerbating global inequality (Casey et al. 2019 ). However, population development, fertility, and mortality are not only affected by climate change but also by other environmental stresses like air pollution (Conforti et al. 2018 ). A successful combination of endogenous fertility and mortality with natural resource scarcity, agricultural production, and pollution accumulation as well as capital and knowledge build-up in a comprehensive framework is a respectable challenge for an economic modeller; we suggest that in the future it should be considered by economists more intensively.

Land use and soil degradation The terrestrial biosphere with its products, functions and ecosystem services is the foundation of human existence, not only for food security but far beyond. Currently, about a quarter of ice-free land area is degraded by human impacts (IPCC 2019 ). The optimal use of scarce land resources becomes an even more urgent topic in the face of the biodiversity crisis and the onset of climate change. This holds especially as the physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food is the basic precondition for human existence. Climate change challenges this access on different levels. On the one hand, climate change increases the pressure on productive land areas (due to extreme weather events such as droughts, floods, forest fires or the shifting of climatic zones). On the other hand, land plays a major role in many climate protection scenarios by reducing emissions from land use and land use change, protecting carbon stocks in soils and ecosystems, and conserving and expanding natural carbon sinks. Also, the capture and storage of CO 2 through carbon dioxide removal technologies plays an increasing role for reaching the Paris climate goals (IPCC 2018 ). The induced increase in the demand for the different services from land inevitably implies trade-offs. However, neither the trade-offs nor the potentials for synergic uses are, as of now, comprehensively understood from an economic point of view and thus pose a challenge for future research. While there is a growing literature on negative emission technologies, their costs, potentials and side effects (Fuss et al. 2019 and references within) as well as on the interaction between climate goals and other SGDs on the global level (von Stechow et al. 2016 ), many research questions still remain to be addressed (Minx et al. 2018 ). This concerns especially a better understanding of opportunity costs, governance requirements, regional and distributional effects as well as of acceptance and ethical considerations. With respect to land degradation and land use for food production, changing climate and weather conditions as well as regional population pressure may raise the rate of land degradation (Fezzi and Bateman 2015 ), hurting food security and calling for preservation policies (Brausmann and Bretschger 2018 ). The overuse of ecosystems like forests and water, which protect and complement land, can accelerate the risk of adverse shocks and thus lower soil fertility, which reveals the close link between the different research subjects. However, much of the agricultural research in this field is still quite distant from mainstream environmental economics which can harm research productivity substantially. It remains a challenge to integrate agricultural and environmental research better, for example by bringing together food production, population, and the environment into a macrodynamic framework (Lanz et al. 2017 ).

Environmental migration Migration in times of climate change is an extraordinarily complex, multicausal and controversial challenge (Adger et al. 2014 ). Heatwaves, droughts, hurricanes, and rising sea levels are likely to motivate or even force a growing number of people to leave their homes moving to presumably safer places. Climate-related migration can take a variety of different forms (Warner 2011) from voluntary to involuntary, from short- to long-distance and from temporary to permanent. Migration decisions are usually based on different motives and personal circumstances (climatically, politically, economically, socially), leading to heterogeneous reactions to climate events and making it often problematic to identify and delineate climate-induced migration. Due to these and other methodological difficulties and the small number of studies so far, no globally reliable forecasts for climate induced migration exist (WBGU - German Advisory Council on Global Change 2018a , b ). At present, the forecasted magnitude of the phenomenon ranges from 25 million up to 1 billion people by 2050 (Ionesco et al. 2017 ). Much of this migration can be expected to take place within countries, for example, from rural to urban areas or from drylands to coastal zones (Henderson et al. 2014 ) with environmental migration being one possible adaptation and survivor strategy in the face of climate change (Millock 2015 ). Given the uncertainty in future migration projections, the challenge is to improve migration models (Cattaneo et al. 2019 ) which includes a better understanding and integration of the microfoundation of agents’ migration decisions. Migration, and especially mass-migration, can have a profound impact on the environment of the new as well as the old settlement location and on their economic structure. Labor and commodities markets will be affected the most, with challenges arising also for education and health systems, government budgets and public spending. By affecting public institutions and the skill-mix of the labor force, migration alters economic development both in the sending and in the receiving countries or regions. More research is needed on these impacts. The influx of environmental migrants to new settlement locations may also trigger hostile attitudes and lead to clashes and even armed conflicts. The migrants may be perceived as rivals for scarce resources (land, clean water) or jobs. The situation may be aggravated by lack of political stability and poor-quality political institutions. Dealing with these aspects gives rise to new challenges in environment and resource economics. Traditional analysis of economic costs and benefits of migration have to be complemented by behavioral economic and political economy analyses.

Urbanization as a key for environmental development In the last 70 years, the urban population has increased fivefold with more than half of the world’s population living in cities today and forecasts projecting the share of urban population to rise to almost 70% in 2050 (UN - United Nations 2018 ). Cities are responsible for about 70% of the world energy use and global CO \(_{2}\) -emissions (Seto et al. 2014 ) and ecological footprints are positively correlated to the degree of urbanization (WBGU - German Advisory Council on Global Change 2016 ). In 2014, about 880 million people were living in slums (UN - United Nations 2016 ) elucidating the problems to make urban development environmentally as well as economically and socially sustainable. The speed of urbanization is projected to be the fastest in low and middle income countries, especially in Africa and Asia (UN - United Nations 2018 ), leading to new challenges for the provision of infrastructure, housing, energy supply, transport and even health care. Climate change can be expected to not only foster urbanization trends (Henderson et al. 2017 ) but also increase the magnitude of urbanization-related challenges. Urban areas are often located close to the coast or rivers basins, making them susceptible to rising sea levels and impacts of extreme weather events. Risks can be expected to be higher for poor households due to settlement in less safe areas and poorer housing (Barata et al. 2011 ), potentially perpetuating existing inequalities. On the other hand, cities might offer more efficient adaptation potentials. To date the consequences of climate change for cities and urbanization are still to be determined in detail but depend heavily on factors like location, size and level of development as well as governance capacities. Making cities, their population and their infrastructure resilient to climate change will be decisive for future development. The main challenge here is to better connect the research fields of environmental and urban economics to understand the drivers and dynamic effects of climate change on urbanization and resulting economic development, on adaptation costs and benefits and on the role of institutions. Insights from regional, political and behavioral economics can help shape effective governance to enhance resilience of cities to climate change.

Health and epidemiological environment Environmental degradation can have profound implications for human health. These implications lead to direct as well as indirect challenges for economic decision making, economic development and thus economic research. While many of these challenges might not be new per se, they can be severely exacerbated by, for example, climate change. Economic implications of long-term increases in vector-borne diseases and heat stress as well as pandemics like the COVID-19 and ozone formation still remain to be analyzed in depth, as do the costs and benefits of adaptation measures dedicated to mitigating these effects (Mendelsohn 2012 ). Climate change also affects human health indirectly through impacts on economic development, land use, and biodiversity - and vice versa. Failed emission reductions and bad environmental management especially impact developing countries negatively through direct effects on health but also through health effects of delayed poverty reduction (Fankhauser and Stern 2020 ). Exposure to diseases or epidemics can increase the risk of civil conflicts and violence (Cervellati et al. 2016 , 2018 ). While research has addressed effects of life-expectancy, diseases and premature mortality on long-run economic development (e.g. Ebenstein et al. 2015 ; Acemoglu and Johnson 2007 ), a thorough analysis of the climate-health-development nexus is still missing. Overall, most research carried out on the interaction between environment, climate and human health has focused on physical health and mortality. The effects of air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels or agriculture on premature deaths, cardiac conditions and respiratory diseases, for example, received not only renewed interest in the wake of recent scandals (see e.g. Alexander and Schwandt 2019 ) but have been an active field of research for a number of years (Schlenker and Walker 2016 ; Tschofen et al. 2019 ). Mental health implications like stress, anxiety or depression on the other hand have received much less attention although, for example, Chen et al. ( 2018 ) in a study on air pollution in China estimate these effects to be on a similar scale to costs arising from impacts on physical health. Also, Danzer and Danzer ( 2016 ) find substantial effects of a large energy-related disaster (the Chernobyl catastrophe) on subjective well-being and mental health. Economic research should take up the challenge and put more effort into the economic evaluation of mental health related effects of climate change and environmental degradation in general. Potential to analyze these and other health-related questions have risen substantially in the last years, method-wise as well as topical, with new large data sets becoming available. Big data from insurance companies, satellite imagery on pollution dispersion and effects of draughts, for example, can provide new insights into the dynamics between environmental changes and health. But digital technologies themselves also generate new research questions addressing, for example, risks, costs and benefits of these new technologies.

Carbon exposure and green finance The impact of climate change and of climate policy on the financial system is a topic of increasing public concern. The transition to a low-carbon economy poses a lot of challenges not only from physical risks and damages but also from transition risks. These accrue in such different areas as climate-related policy making, altered market behavior, changes in international trade patterns, technology development, and consumer behavior. To support a safe and gradual transition to a low-carbon economy, the financial sector needs to evaluate and eventually address the new risks associated with climate change and decarbonization in an efficient manner. There is widespread concern that financial markets currently lack sufficient information about the carbon exposure of assets, resulting in risks from climate change and climate policy for investments (Karydas and Xepapadeas 2018 ). If not anticipated by the markets, climate shocks also cause asset stranding, i.e. unanticipated and premature capital write-offs, downward revaluations, and conversion of assets to liabilities (Rozenberg et al. 2020 ; Bretschger and Soretz 2018 ). The same holds true for climate policies which are not or cannot be correctly anticipated by investors (Dietz et al. 2016 ; Stolbova et al. 2018 ; Sen and von Schickfus 2020 ). The growing awareness of these risks is reflected in the attention that policy makers have devoted to the development of transparency improving information systems and indicators in recent years. However, challenges related the design of these systems and indicators, e.g. with respect to an accurate and encompassing risk assessment, still remain. The importance of addressing these challenges is excerbated by prevalent network effects and counterparty risks that transmit climate-induced financial shocks from individual firms to the broad public holding their capital in stocks of fossil-fuel-related firms, investment funds, and pension funds, which all could suffer from stranded assets (Battiston et al. 2017 ). Divestment campaigns, shareholder engagement, and mandatory disclosure of climate-relevant financial information by companies and investors warrant further theoretical and empirical analysis. Also, a better understanding of the economics behind financing instruments like green bonds is only recently emerging (Agliardi and Agliardi 2019 ). Despite some early studies there is a knowledge gap with respect to the extent of climate and policy risks for central banks and regarding the potential significance of different channels connecting the risks in the real economy with monetary policy. Given the environmental and international policy perspective of the climate problem, the specific contribution of the financial sector and the central banks in the architecture of global climate policy has to be subject to further investigation.

Energy system transformation The transition from a fossil-based to a green economy is needed to combat climate change but requires a thorough transformation of energy systems (Pommeret and Schubert 2019 ) in developed as well as in developing countries. In industrialized countries, challenges arise from the structural transformation of highly complex energy systems and their linkage with other economic sectors. While one hundred years ago, it was the rapid dissemination of fossil-based industrial processes, transportation, and heating that resulted in wide-spread sectoral change, similar adjustments can be expected with the increasing importance of electricity for decarbonization. However, changing the use of energy technologies in practice involves decisions on different levels and constitutes a highly nonlinear process. Future power generation in many countries will increasingly rely on renewable energies like wind and solar energy. To offset intermittent power generation, more and better storage capacities of batteries or pumped hydropower will be needed (Ambec and Crampes 2019 ). Synthetic fuels, heat pumps, fuel cells and e-mobility will increasingly use electricity to replace fossil fuels not only in the power sector but also in traffic and heat generation. While the adoption of renewable technologies like wind and solar was often much faster than predicted in the past, the critical mass of market penetration has still to be reached in other areas to benefit from potential scale effects and cost decreases. Shape and speed of the energy transition are, however, highly dependent on a political process which is hard to predict for market participants. Policy and ecological risks, together with the long-run character of the energy and related infrastructure investments, pose a big challenge for research and practice. In this context, it is especially the economic potential of green hydrogen and/or synthetic fuels that is controversially discussed at present. As production costs are expected to fall (Glenk and Reichelstein 2019 ), interest in hydrogen is increasing sharply (IEA 2019 ) and new research questions arise. For developing countries, clean and decentralized renewable energy technologies offer big potentials for electrification and economic development. However, despite the potential for decarbonization and the reduction of other externalities and health hazards and despite the fact that more than 90% of the annual increase in power generation comes from emerging economies, research on the development and adoption of clean energy technologies still focuses mainly on the developed world. More research on the barriers and challenges for adoption in developing countries is needed, including sustainable financing, institutional framing and the design of regionally tailored policies.

Sustainability perspective on digitalization Digitalization and artificial intelligence are often seen as opportunities for enhancing the efficiency of energy and resource use. They offer new opportunities for circular economy, agriculture, monitoring of ecosystems and biodiversity, sustainable finance and decarbonization (see WBGU 2019 and literature within). However, they may also accelerate energy and resource use, increase inequality between regions and income groups and endanger sustainable development. Digitalization offers new access to markets, impacts market forms and shapes consumer behavior all of which can have extensive implications for the ecological, social and economic dimensions of sustainable development. Digitalization is a cross-cutting theme that reaches across spatial scales (from regional development to globalization) as well as temporal scales (from short-run impacts on energy systems to long-run adaptation to climate change). So far, the potentials and challenges for sustainable development that are associated with digital technologies have mostly been addressed outside of environmental and resource economics. The focus has been on topics such as data security and privacy or, for example, on the implications of the ”fourth industrial revolution” on employment and labor markets. Costs and benefits of digitization, the design and effectiveness of policies in industrialized as well as developing countries have garnered much less attention in the context of environmental, resource, energy and climate economics. Also, impacts of digitization on the behavior of economic agents resulting in, for example, rebound effects or changes in consumption patterns and environmental awareness, have not been addressed comprehensively (Gossar 2015 ). In all of these areas, our limited knowledge base creates opportunities and challenges for future research in the field. But, digitalization not only creates new research questions, it also provides new means to answer them. It has led to new developments in data science, big data analysis, machine learning and artificial intelligence that allow new insights into, for example, material flows, emission patterns and technology diffusion as well as the optimal design, implementation and effectiveness of regulation (Fowlie et al. 2019 ; Weersink et al. 2018 ; Graziano and Gillingham 2015 ).

Quantitative analysis of environmental use Recently, there has been a significant shift in the empirical methods used in economics from traditional regression analysis to random assignment and quasi-experiments. Arguably this can improve the capturing of causal relationships and reduce the biases of traditional study designs. In environmental economics, experimental and quasi-experimental approaches have been applied mainly for capturing individuals’ or firms’ decisions on the use of land, water, resources, and energy (e.g. Allcott 2011 ; Duflo et al. 2013 ; Deschenes et al. 2017 ). Wider applications of these rigorous methods in environmental economics and well-suited empirical designs are desirable but certainly challenging e.g. when assessing aggregate environmental costs from climate change or biodiversity loss. An important but underrated field in applied environmental economics is the ex-post empirical assessment of environmental policies. The challenge is not only to identify environmental externalities, causalities, and impact intensities but also to provide an accurate valuation of the cost of policies, because they vary widely especially in environmental economics. The traditional empirical methods remain to be important and are not simply replaced. The same holds true for empirical designs in a time, cross-country, or panel structure. The increasing availability of large or very large datasets with observations varying widely across time and space offers a different set of options to provide evidence on the impact of environmental damages or policies to abate them (e.g. Currie and Walker 2011 ; Martin et al. 2014 ; Zhang et al. 2018 ). Fast-growing computational power and machine learning provide even more avenues for fruitful applications in environmental economics (see e.g. Abrell et al. 2019 ) but the challenge to use computer power wisely and to derive results which are sufficiently robust remains demanding .

Structural assessment modelling and modelling transparency In an effort to better understand the ramifications of political decisions and technological developments on climate change, energy supply and resource extraction (to name but a few examples), increasingly sophisticated numerical models have been developed in recent decades. It is evident that quantitative economics analysis is important for policy advice. Yet despite their complexity, these models usually still adopt some very simplifying and sometimes ad-hoc assumptions. In particular assumptions used in integrated valuation models have come under heavy criticism in recent years (Stern 2013 ; Pindyck 2013 ). Simplifications concern market structures and market failures, the integration of risk and uncertainty as well as societal, institutional and cultural detail. Also, manifestations of climate change and damages come at very different regional and temporal scales, making a truly integrated assessment of the climate-ecosystem-economy nexus next to impossible. We see it as a major challenge for future research to provide more accurate foundations for integrated assessment models. While simplifications are needed to reduce computational complexity, they raise the question to which extent the results obtained render reliable insights into future developments. Asking for models that are detailed in every dimension and can answer every question resembles of course the search for the holy grail. However, the need for a better understanding of the model dynamics has already led to the development of a new generation of models which have a stronger foundation in theory (Golosov et al. 2014 , Bretschger and Karydas 2019 ). A better understanding of the limits of models and of the questions specific models can and cannot address is still needed as well as transparency in model development. More applied studies, assessments of global environmental trends under different economic assumptions often use ”scenarios” to describe future trajectories. The scenarios are mostly based on expert opinion and do not rely on estimates about the likelihood that such a trajectory will occur. It is also critical that the economics behind the scenarios is often neglected. Prominently, per capita income can be projected using endogenous growth theory, while population development can be evaluated using state-of-the-art theories on fertility and morbidity.

3 Conclusions

This article set out to highlight a number of challenges that are highly relevant for future research in the field of environmental and resource economics. The focus was mainly, although not exclusively, on topical issues. We only briefly touched upon on some methodological advancements that might have the power to further parts of our field. Big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence hold high promise in this regard but their limits and potentials for environment, climate and resource economics have yet to be fully understood.

It should have become clear, that a number of the challenges presented can only be addressed adequately by interdisciplinary research teams with relevant disciplines ranging from climate science, (computer) engineering, sociology, virology to soil sciences. In many cases, economists’ analysis and the derivation of sound policy recommendations require the knowledge available in these fields. However, such research cooperations are by no means one-way streets: Other disciplines need the input of economists in order to assess future development scenarios and implementability of solutions. The knowledge and data required for economics analysis does not always exist yet, but interdisciplinary cooperation can help to identify and close these gaps. Overall, the less economists have already worked on specific challenges, the harder it is to assess best research strategies and the potential for success. Take the digitization-sustainable-development-nexus as an example: best research strategies and success are extremely difficult to predict as not only is the related economics research still in its infancy but also the field itself is extremely dynamic.

As already pointed out in the beginning: We are aware that our selection is bound to create discontent and disagreement. Having said this, it should also be stated that we expect some of our challenges to be more or less universally agreed upon. This holds especially for the broader topics: for example, how to accomplish deep decarbonization; how to deal with risk and uncertainty; or how to assess the role of disruptive development. One reason for this lies in the encompassing nature of these topics. They are relevant for many of the other fields that we have pointed out: For behavioral analyses, the capacity to deal with disruptive change in the face of risk and uncertainty are essential. Loss of biodiversity and natural capital, land degradation, conflicts over resources and migration are exacerbated by climate change. The potential of digitization for sustainable development constitutes disruptive change in itself. Yet, all of these fields are not merely subfields of the more overarching themes, they raise important research questions in their own right.

Nevertheless, it is to be expected that it will be the more specific fields over which disagreement will arise: Are ‘land use and soil degradation’ more important than ‘fisheries’? Is the ‘institutional analysis of environmental policies’ of higher relevance than the ‘development of alternative welfare concepts’ (to pick out some random examples). Of course, there are more fields that could have been included and also, of course, there is no objective criterion for the inclusion or exclusion of fields. The selection of the challenges is based on the analysis and criteria presented in the first section but it is ultimately ours; we are happy if this paper contributes to a lively and constructive discussion about the future of our field.

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Bretschger, L., Pittel, K. Twenty Key Challenges in Environmental and Resource Economics. Environ Resource Econ 77 , 725–750 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-020-00516-y

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• We already see effects scientists predicted, such as the loss of sea ice, melting glaciers and ice sheets, sea level rise, and more intense heat waves.
• Scientists predict global temperature increases from human-made greenhouse gases will continue. Severe weather damage will also increase and intensify.

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Global climate change is not a future problem. Changes to Earth’s climate driven by increased human emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases are already having widespread effects on the environment: glaciers and ice sheets are shrinking, river and lake ice is breaking up earlier, plant and animal geographic ranges are shifting, and plants and trees are blooming sooner.

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The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment report, published in 2021, found that human emissions of heat-trapping gases have already warmed the climate by nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) since 1850-1900. 1 The global average temperature is expected to reach or exceed 1.5 degrees C (about 3 degrees F) within the next few decades. These changes will affect all regions of Earth.

The severity of effects caused by climate change will depend on the path of future human activities. More greenhouse gas emissions will lead to more climate extremes and widespread damaging effects across our planet. However, those future effects depend on the total amount of carbon dioxide we emit. So, if we can reduce emissions, we may avoid some of the worst effects.

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Here are some of the expected effects of global climate change on the United States, according to the Third and Fourth National Climate Assessment Reports:

Future effects of global climate change in the United States:

U.S. Sea Level Likely to Rise 1 to 6.6 Feet by 2100

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Climate Changes Will Continue Through This Century and Beyond

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U.S. Regional Effects

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• Northeast. Heat waves, heavy downpours, and sea level rise pose increasing challenges to many aspects of life in the Northeast. Infrastructure, agriculture, fisheries, and ecosystems will be increasingly compromised. Farmers can explore new crop options, but these adaptations are not cost- or risk-free. Moreover, adaptive capacity , which varies throughout the region, could be overwhelmed by a changing climate. Many states and cities are beginning to incorporate climate change into their planning.
• Northwest. Changes in the timing of peak flows in rivers and streams are reducing water supplies and worsening competing demands for water. Sea level rise, erosion, flooding, risks to infrastructure, and increasing ocean acidity pose major threats. Increasing wildfire incidence and severity, heat waves, insect outbreaks, and tree diseases are causing widespread forest die-off.
• Southeast. Sea level rise poses widespread and continuing threats to the region’s economy and environment. Extreme heat will affect health, energy, agriculture, and more. Decreased water availability will have economic and environmental impacts.
• Midwest. Extreme heat, heavy downpours, and flooding will affect infrastructure, health, agriculture, forestry, transportation, air and water quality, and more. Climate change will also worsen a range of risks to the Great Lakes.
• Southwest. Climate change has caused increased heat, drought, and insect outbreaks. In turn, these changes have made wildfires more numerous and severe. The warming climate has also caused a decline in water supplies, reduced agricultural yields, and triggered heat-related health impacts in cities. In coastal areas, flooding and erosion are additional concerns.

1. IPCC 2021, Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis , the Working Group I contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

2. IPCC, 2013: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Stocker, T.F., D. Qin, G.-K. Plattner, M. Tignor, S.K. Allen, J. Boschung, A. Nauels, Y. Xia, V. Bex and P.M. Midgley (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA.

3. USGCRP 2014, Third Climate Assessment .

4. USGCRP 2017, Fourth Climate Assessment .

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Finding and choosing a strong research topic is the critical first step when it comes to crafting a high-quality dissertation, thesis or research project. Here, we’ll explore a variety research ideas and topic thought-starters related to various environmental science disciplines, including ecology, oceanography, hydrology, geology, soil science, environmental chemistry, environmental economics, and environmental ethics.

NB – This is just the start…

The topic ideation and evaluation process has multiple steps . In this post, we’ll kickstart the process by sharing some research topic ideas within the environmental sciences. This is the starting point though. To develop a well-defined research topic, you’ll need to identify a clear and convincing research gap , along with a well-justified plan of action to fill that gap.

If you’re new to the oftentimes perplexing world of research, or if this is your first time undertaking a formal academic research project, be sure to check out our free dissertation mini-course. Also be sure to also sign up for our free webinar that explores how to develop a high-quality research topic from scratch.

Overview: Environmental Topics

• Ecology /ecological science
• Atmospheric science
• Oceanography
• Soil science
• Environmental chemistry
• Environmental economics
• Environmental ethics
• Examples  of dissertations and theses

Topics & Ideas: Ecological Science

• The impact of land-use change on species diversity and ecosystem functioning in agricultural landscapes
• The role of disturbances such as fire and drought in shaping arid ecosystems
• The impact of climate change on the distribution of migratory marine species
• Investigating the role of mutualistic plant-insect relationships in maintaining ecosystem stability
• The effects of invasive plant species on ecosystem structure and function
• The impact of habitat fragmentation caused by road construction on species diversity and population dynamics in the tropics
• The role of ecosystem services in urban areas and their economic value to a developing nation
• The effectiveness of different grassland restoration techniques in degraded ecosystems
• The impact of land-use change through agriculture and urbanisation on soil microbial communities in a temperate environment
• The role of microbial diversity in ecosystem health and nutrient cycling in an African savannah

Topics & Ideas: Atmospheric Science

• The impact of climate change on atmospheric circulation patterns above tropical rainforests
• The role of atmospheric aerosols in cloud formation and precipitation above cities with high pollution levels
• The impact of agricultural land-use change on global atmospheric composition
• Investigating the role of atmospheric convection in severe weather events in the tropics
• The impact of urbanisation on regional and global atmospheric ozone levels
• The impact of sea surface temperature on atmospheric circulation and tropical cyclones
• The impact of solar flares on the Earth’s atmospheric composition
• The impact of climate change on atmospheric turbulence and air transportation safety
• The impact of stratospheric ozone depletion on atmospheric circulation and climate change
• The role of atmospheric rivers in global water supply and sea-ice formation

Topics & Ideas: Oceanography

• The impact of ocean acidification on kelp forests and biogeochemical cycles
• The role of ocean currents in distributing heat and regulating desert rain
• The impact of carbon monoxide pollution on ocean chemistry and biogeochemical cycles
• Investigating the role of ocean mixing in regulating coastal climates
• The impact of sea level rise on the resource availability of low-income coastal communities
• The impact of ocean warming on the distribution and migration patterns of marine mammals
• The impact of ocean deoxygenation on biogeochemical cycles in the arctic
• The role of ocean-atmosphere interactions in regulating rainfall in arid regions
• The impact of ocean eddies on global ocean circulation and plankton distribution
• The role of ocean-ice interactions in regulating the Earth’s climate and sea level

Tops & Ideas: Hydrology

• The impact of agricultural land-use change on water resources and hydrologic cycles in temperate regions
• The impact of agricultural groundwater availability on irrigation practices in the global south
• The impact of rising sea-surface temperatures on global precipitation patterns and water availability
• Investigating the role of wetlands in regulating water resources for riparian forests
• The impact of tropical ranches on river and stream ecosystems and water quality
• The impact of urbanisation on regional and local hydrologic cycles and water resources for agriculture
• The role of snow cover and mountain hydrology in regulating regional agricultural water resources
• The impact of drought on food security in arid and semi-arid regions
• The role of groundwater recharge in sustaining water resources in arid and semi-arid environments
• The impact of sea level rise on coastal hydrology and the quality of water resources

Topics & Ideas: Geology

• The impact of tectonic activity on the East African rift valley
• The role of mineral deposits in shaping ancient human societies
• The impact of sea-level rise on coastal geomorphology and shoreline evolution
• Investigating the role of erosion in shaping the landscape and impacting desertification
• The impact of mining on soil stability and landslide potential
• The impact of volcanic activity on incoming solar radiation and climate
• The role of geothermal energy in decarbonising the energy mix of megacities
• The impact of Earth’s magnetic field on geological processes and solar wind
• The impact of plate tectonics on the evolution of mammals
• The role of the distribution of mineral resources in shaping human societies and economies, with emphasis on sustainability

Topics & Ideas: Soil Science

• The impact of dam building on soil quality and fertility
• The role of soil organic matter in regulating nutrient cycles in agricultural land
• The impact of climate change on soil erosion and soil organic carbon storage in peatlands
• Investigating the role of above-below-ground interactions in nutrient cycling and soil health
• The impact of deforestation on soil degradation and soil fertility
• The role of soil texture and structure in regulating water and nutrient availability in boreal forests
• The impact of sustainable land management practices on soil health and soil organic matter
• The impact of wetland modification on soil structure and function
• The role of soil-atmosphere exchange and carbon sequestration in regulating regional and global climate
• The impact of salinization on soil health and crop productivity in coastal communities

Topics & Ideas: Environmental Chemistry

• The impact of cobalt mining on water quality and the fate of contaminants in the environment
• The role of atmospheric chemistry in shaping air quality and climate change
• The impact of soil chemistry on nutrient availability and plant growth in wheat monoculture
• Investigating the fate and transport of heavy metal contaminants in the environment
• The impact of climate change on biochemical cycling in tropical rainforests
• The impact of various types of land-use change on biochemical cycling
• The role of soil microbes in mediating contaminant degradation in the environment
• The impact of chemical and oil spills on freshwater and soil chemistry
• The role of atmospheric nitrogen deposition in shaping water and soil chemistry
• The impact of over-irrigation on the cycling and fate of persistent organic pollutants in the environment

Topics & Ideas: Environmental Economics

• The impact of climate change on the economies of developing nations
• The role of market-based mechanisms in promoting sustainable use of forest resources
• The impact of environmental regulations on economic growth and competitiveness
• Investigating the economic benefits and costs of ecosystem services for African countries
• The impact of renewable energy policies on regional and global energy markets
• The role of water markets in promoting sustainable water use in southern Africa
• The impact of land-use change in rural areas on regional and global economies
• The impact of environmental disasters on local and national economies
• The role of green technologies and innovation in shaping the zero-carbon transition and the knock-on effects for local economies
• The impact of environmental and natural resource policies on income distribution and poverty of rural communities

Topics & Ideas: Environmental Ethics

• The ethical foundations of environmentalism and the environmental movement regarding renewable energy
• The role of values and ethics in shaping environmental policy and decision-making in the mining industry
• The impact of cultural and religious beliefs on environmental attitudes and behaviours in first world countries
• Investigating the ethics of biodiversity conservation and the protection of endangered species in palm oil plantations
• The ethical implications of sea-level rise for future generations and vulnerable coastal populations
• The role of ethical considerations in shaping sustainable use of natural forest resources
• The impact of environmental justice on marginalized communities and environmental policies in Asia
• The ethical implications of environmental risks and decision-making under uncertainty
• The role of ethics in shaping the transition to a low-carbon, sustainable future for the construction industry
• The impact of environmental values on consumer behaviour and the marketplace: a case study of the ‘bring your own shopping bag’ policy

Examples: Real Dissertation & Thesis Topics

While the ideas we’ve presented above are a decent starting point for finding a research topic, they are fairly generic and non-specific. So, it helps to look at actual dissertations and theses to see how this all comes together.

Below, we’ve included a selection of research projects from various environmental science-related degree programs to help refine your thinking. These are actual dissertations and theses, written as part of Master’s and PhD-level programs, so they can provide some useful insight as to what a research topic looks like in practice.

• The physiology of microorganisms in enhanced biological phosphorous removal (Saunders, 2014)
• The influence of the coastal front on heavy rainfall events along the east coast (Henson, 2019)
• Forage production and diversification for climate-smart tropical and temperate silvopastures (Dibala, 2019)
• Advancing spectral induced polarization for near surface geophysical characterization (Wang, 2021)
• Assessment of Chromophoric Dissolved Organic Matter and Thamnocephalus platyurus as Tools to Monitor Cyanobacterial Bloom Development and Toxicity (Hipsher, 2019)
• Evaluating the Removal of Microcystin Variants with Powdered Activated Carbon (Juang, 2020)
• The effect of hydrological restoration on nutrient concentrations, macroinvertebrate communities, and amphibian populations in Lake Erie coastal wetlands (Berg, 2019)
• Utilizing hydrologic soil grouping to estimate corn nitrogen rate recommendations (Bean, 2019)
• Fungal Function in House Dust and Dust from the International Space Station (Bope, 2021)
• Assessing Vulnerability and the Potential for Ecosystem-based Adaptation (EbA) in Sudan’s Blue Nile Basin (Mohamed, 2022)
• A Microbial Water Quality Analysis of the Recreational Zones in the Los Angeles River of Elysian Valley, CA (Nguyen, 2019)
• Dry Season Water Quality Study on Three Recreational Sites in the San Gabriel Mountains (Vallejo, 2019)
• Wastewater Treatment Plan for Unix Packaging Adjustment of the Potential Hydrogen (PH) Evaluation of Enzymatic Activity After the Addition of Cycle Disgestase Enzyme (Miessi, 2020)
• Laying the Genetic Foundation for the Conservation of Longhorn Fairy Shrimp (Kyle, 2021).

Looking at these titles, you can probably pick up that the research topics here are quite specific and narrowly-focused , compared to the generic ones presented earlier. To create a top-notch research topic, you will need to be precise and target a specific context with specific variables of interest . In other words, you’ll need to identify a clear, well-justified research gap.

Need more help?

If you’re still feeling a bit unsure about how to find a research topic for your environmental science dissertation or research project, be sure to check out our private coaching services below, as well as our Research Topic Kickstarter .

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Human Impacts on the Environment

Humans impact the physical environment in many ways: overpopulation, pollution, burning fossil fuels, and deforestation. Changes like these have triggered climate change, soil erosion, poor air quality, and undrinkable water. These negative impacts can affect human behavior and can prompt mass migrations or battles over clean water.

Help your students understand the impact humans have on the physical environment with these classroom resources.

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Rethinking Environmental Protection: Meeting the Challenges of a Changing World

From climate change to hydraulic fracturing, and from drinking water safety to wildfires, environmental challenges are changing. The United States has made substantial environmental protection progress based on media-specific and single pollutant risk-based frameworks. However, today’s environmental problems are increasingly complex and new scientific approaches and tools are needed to achieve sustainable solutions to protect the environment and public health. In this article, we present examples of today’s environmental challenges and offer an integrated systems approach to address them. We provide a strategic framework and recommendations for advancing the application of science for protecting the environment and public health. We posit that addressing 21st century challenges requires transdisciplinary and systems approaches, new data sources, and stakeholder partnerships. To address these challenges, we outline a process driven by problem formulation with the following steps: a ) formulate the problem holistically, b ) gather and synthesize diverse information, c ) develop and assess options, and d ) implement sustainable solutions. This process will require new skills and education in systems science, with an emphasis on science translation. A systems-based approach can transcend media- and receptor-specific bounds, integrate diverse information, and recognize the inextricable link between ecology and human health.

Environmental and public health scientists and decision-makers are addressing new and complex environmental challenges that impact human well-being and ecological health. Energy demands have increased, and sources and approaches to developing energy are changing, raising questions about environmental and human health impacts. Land use patterns are evolving, and land use decisions can impact air, land, and water quality, and consequently, human health. Agriculture and manufacturing are also changing as technology advances. With these changes the focus of environmental protection has expanded beyond local effects and to increasingly recognize the global impacts of human activity on ecological and human health, aptly described as “wicked” problems ( Churchman 1967 ; Rittel and Webber 1973 ; Stahl 2014 ).

Wicked problems exist on various spatial scales that unfold over long temporal scales and have possible global implications. They are difficult to define, unstable, and socially complex; have no clear or single solution or end point; and extend beyond the understanding of one discipline or responsibility of one organization ( NRC 2012 ). Because of the complex interdependencies, efforts to solve one aspect of a problem may reveal or create other problems ( NRC 2012 ). Based on these definitions, the environmental pollution problems of today are termed “wicked” problems ( NRC 2012 ).

In this article, we characterize today’s most pressing wicked environmental health problems and, drawing from research conducted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Office of Research and Development and other environmental organizations, highlight tools and approaches that can be used to evaluate the many complex dimensions of these problems. Finally, we present a new framework for a systems approach for finding sustainable solutions to these complex problems.

Today’s Wicked Problems

A number of complex issues have been identified by the scientific community as wicked problems:

Climate change. In 2015, 195 countries adopted the first universal climate agreement, noting the need for an effective and progressive response to the urgent threat of climate change ( United Nations 2015 ). An increasing range of global adverse effects from climate change are affecting air quality, water resources, agriculture, and wildlife habitats, as well as basic infrastructure systems such as control of contaminated sites, waste management practices, and the functioning of the built environment ( U.S. EPA 2015a ). Climate change is altering the distribution and intensity of public health–related stressors (e.g., temperature, vector-borne diseases) and is eroding gains made in controlling air pollution in many urban areas ( U.S. EPA 2015a ). While some geographic areas may see advantages of a warmer climate (e.g., reductions in death due to extreme cold temperatures), estimates show the net impacts of climate change are likely to be widespread and significant ( McCabe and Burke 2016 ). Without continued emission reductions, the public health and welfare of current and future generations are in jeopardy, and vulnerable citizens, like children, older adults, and people living in poverty, are most at risk ( U.S. EPA 2015b ).

Energy. Choices about future energy sources have far-reaching economic, social, environmental, and public health effects. Energy provides essential support for society. From the household to the industrial setting, it is used to produce and transport goods, move people, and support a productive and growing economy. At the same time, energy production and use affect environmental quality. Oil and gas development, whether conventional or shale oil and gas, pose inherent environmental and public health risks ( GAO 2012 ). Historically, fossil fuel-based energy production and use have affected air quality and the climate, creating emissions of conventional air pollutants and greenhouse gases. As the use of natural gas has expanded, practices such as hydraulic fracturing have raised important questions about potential environmental and public health impacts ( GAO 2012 ). Water quality and quantity are affected because water is needed to produce energy, and the process of producing energy can potentially lead to water contamination. Because energy is central to a strong economy, the quest for cleaner energy sources has driven new technologies to convert sunlight, wind, or geothermal energy into electricity. Likewise, federal regulations related to energy—along with social dimensions such as consumer preference for clean energy—are driving the changing energy landscape. Scientists must be prepared to understand the full scope of these drivers and provide the research and technical knowledge to illuminate the risks and benefits and guide energy policies.

Land use. The health and well-being of a community is closely coupled with land use and development. From inner cities to rural farming communities, quality of life and environment can depend upon land use policies. Land use decisions about roads and transportation systems, industrial siting and development, agricultural land use and the provision of community access to healthy and sustainable food, housing, and open space for parks and recreation can all impact human health. The distribution of green space in populated areas is a factor in physical activity, stress, and related physical and mental health issues ( Lee and Maheswaran 2010 ; Lachowycz and Jones 2013 ). By influencing social interaction and the variety, density, and accessibility of necessities and amenities, decisions regarding land use planning affect well-being through community vibrancy and the autonomy of marginalized populations ( Jackson 2003 ). Land use decisions can drive cascading events that may adversely impact ecological and human health. For example, land use decisions can influence fire risk ( Butsic et al. 2015 ), and wildland fires can alter the landscape, increase erosion, and foster runoff ( Morrison and Kolden 2015 ). Resulting wildland fire smoke, a mixture of gases and fine particles, can cause respiratory illness and aggravate chronic heart and lung diseases ( U.S. EPA 2003 ; Rappold et al. 2011 ).

Water quantity and quality. About 400 billion gallons of water are used each day in the United States, and we face many challenges in maintaining the safety and sustainability of these water resources ( U.S. EPA 2015d ). For example, emerging chemical contaminants, such as perfluorinated compounds, found nationwide in water supplies, may not be removed by conventional water treatment or addressed by policy or regulatory actions ( Sedlak 2016 ). An aging water system infrastructure has led to an estimated 240,000 water main breaks in the United States annually ( ASCE 2013 ), which can only exacerbate water shortages. The recent water crisis in Flint, Michigan, where lead leached from pipes in older drinking water systems and reached levels that exceeded regulatory limits, also highlighted the importance of proper treatment of source water to prevent such occurrences ( Bellinger 2016 ). Harmful algal blooms (HAB), a natural phenomenon, can be influenced by anthropogenic forces and climate change: and expanding human populations could impact HAB occurrence and public health impacts ( Berdalet et al. 2015 ). Drought is a concern for many communities, and the effects of climate change are expected to increase the frequency, intensity, and duration of droughts in many regions ( White House 2016 ). These examples are just a few of the many challenges threatening the safety and sustainability of the water supply in the United States.

Connecting the Dots—A Systems Approach to Environmental Protection

Environmental challenges have historically been managed with compartmentalized and pollutant specific, risk-based approaches. Although such approaches were successful in addressing part of the problem in the past, they are ill-suited to solve today’s wicked environmental challenges. Rather, today’s problems call for a systems approach that looks at a problem holistically, includes all the drivers and stressors that affect it and the dimensions that frame it, and integrates information from human health and ecological sciences and the social sciences to formulate sustainable solutions to environmental issues.

To understand the links between public health, the environment, and society, the interactions of factors within a complex system must be evaluated in a realistic way, regardless of its size, which can range from the scale of the molecule to that of the biosphere (global ecosystem) ( Figure 1 ). Systems thinking considers the cumulative effects of multiple stressors, evaluates a range of alternatives, analyzes upstream and downstream life-cycle implications, involves a broad range of stakeholders, and uses interdisciplinary scientific approaches ( NRC 2012 ). Systems approaches are not new, and the scientific literature provides many examples ( Powers et al. 2012 ; Briggs 2008 ; Fiksel 2006 ). In public health, Guyer (1997) describes a systems process for problem solving that first defines the problem and measures its magnitude, then develops a framework for evaluating the key determinants (biologic, epidemiologic, social, cultural, economic, and political). Contemporary assessments stress the need for systems thinking. For example, a health impact assessment (HIA) uses a systems approach to array data sources and analytic methods and considers input from stakeholders to determine potential effects of a proposed action or decision on the health of a population and the distribution of those effects within the population ( NRC 2011 ). Likewise, a life-cycle assessment uses systems approaches to evaluate a cradle-to-grave process, including all stages of a product’s life from the perspective that they are interdependent ( U.S. EPA 2006 ).

Nested systems from the molecular level to the biosphere.

The Tools of 21st-Century Science and Technology

Concurrent with the changing nature of environmental issues, science and technology are evolving rapidly and offering new tools and methods of analysis needed in taking a systems approach to a problem. For example, modeling real-world scenarios can inform our understanding of interactions within a system, which helps forecast possible intervention outcomes. Computational models, which use and integrate data from many sources to understand and predict system dynamics and impacts of environmental pollutants, have become central to environmental decision-making ( NRC 2007 ). Computational science provides more information than ever before along with the means for analyzing what the information means. The Toxicology Testing in the 21st Century (Tox21), a federal collaborative program that develops high-throughput assays to efficiently test a chemical’s potential to cause adverse health effects ( U.S. EPA 2015c ), is anticipated to deliver a wealth of information about the potential effects of tens of thousands of chemicals ( Attene-Ramos et al. 2013 ). Computational exposure science, which integrates advances in chemistry, computer science, mathematics, statistics, and social and behavioral sciences with new models and data collection methods, will provide tools to better understand population exposures and link exposures to health outcomes ( Egeghy et al. 2016 ).

Changes in technology have spurred the development of low-cost compact sensors for measuring environmental parameters and indicators of health ( Kumar et al. 2015 ; Murphy et al. 2014 ; Chan et al. 2012 ). These sensors can be deployed in multiple locations to monitor pollutant concentrations around a facility or community more accurately than is possible with single stationary monitors ( Snyder et al. 2013 ). Satellite technology can enhance air quality forecasting, emissions estimation, and exposure assessment for human health studies ( Hoff and Christopher 2009 ). The availability of personal computers, mobile phones, and Internet access has revolutionized the communication of information and ideas. Citizen science, which encourages public participation in the scientific process ( Kalil and Wilkinson 2015 ), provides a new way to engage the public in solving problems. Crowdsourcing—an open call for voluntary assistance from a large group of individuals ( Kalil and Wilkinson 2015 )—can help collect information at large geographic scales and over long periods of time.

These technological advances will yield enormous volumes of complex data, both structured and unstructured, originating from different sources. Big data may revolutionize how we monitor environmental quality and understand how humans interact and respond to the environment ( Kays et al. 2015 ) and how the environment responds to human activity ( Dagliati et al. 2015 ). However, the analysis of and need for access and discoverability of big data presents challenges that include protecting individual interests and privacy, managing enormous volumes of data, identifying the most important types of data, understanding data quality, integrating data into a form to analyze and guide decisions, and making the information publically accessible in forms that can be shared and combined for analysis.

Moving to the Future

Moving forward, we need a new comprehensive approach to solve environmental challenges that a ) begins with strong problem formulation, b ) relies on systems approaches and tools to integrate different types of data from multiple disciplines, c ) draws on information generated from new technologies, and d ) considers novel sources of data, such as citizen science. Evolving from case experiences, tools, and approaches developed over the years, we propose adopting a new framework ( Figure 2 ) for environmental science that uses a systems approach to integrate ecological and human health information to solve environmental challenges. This framework includes the following elements and considers vested partners, communities, scientists, decision makers, and the public, and the need for science translation, education, and communication. Table 1 describes each element, summarizes the approaches, and provides examples of tools designed to facilitate its use.

Framework for applying integrated science to protect the environment and public health and well-being.

Considerations, information sources, tools, and approaches for framework elements.

Formulate the problem holistically. Environmental health problems should be framed within a systems context and should consider ecological, health, social, and economic factors across space and time. Interactions, interdependencies, and cumulative effects are considered, as are the values and goals of vested partners, including the community and the public. By engaging end users early in the process, information and solutions will be more responsive and relevant to their needs. Formulating the problem holistically will improve understanding of potential unanticipated outcomes. Tools and guidance for problem formulation exist. For example, Suter (1993) described the process of creating a conceptual model for ecological risk assessments. This approach can help inform our understanding of system linkages, points of potential intervention, and the information needed to inform policy decisions. Gregory et al. (2012) and Yee et al. (2015) proposed a structured decision-making process, and Bruins et al. (2010) demonstrated the use of problem formulation for addressing complex socio-environmental problems. The U.S. EPA’s “Framework for Human Health Risk Assessment to Inform Decision-Making” ( U.S. EPA 2014b ) describes the importance of problem formulation and provides information to consider during this process.

Gather and synthesize diverse information. Guided by problem formulation, the next step is to identify diverse data and information needed to support the assessment. Economic, social, and environmental information should be considered, including socioeconomic status, health, cultural resources, local knowledge, traditions and practices, and existing conditions of the built and natural environment. For example, a more holistic model based on a systems approach was recently proposed for improving children’s environments and health across developmental life stages ( Tulve et al. 2016 ). Various tools can inform this step. Ideally, they should be discoverable and widely accessible to users in web-based formats. For example, the “Community-Focused Exposure and Risk Screening Tool” (C-FERST; https://www.epa.gov/c-ferst ), a community mapping, information access tool, can inform community assessments and decision-making ( Zartarian et al. 2011 ). “EnviroAtlas,” an interactive mapping tool, can be used to explore the benefits people receive from nature ( Pickard et al. 2015 ). The EnviroAtlas Eco-Health Relationship browser ( https://www.epa.gov/enviroatlas/enviroatlas-eco-health-relationship-browser ) provides information about how health issues are linked to the metrics of ecosystem services—the societal benefits from nature that underpin almost every aspect of human well-being ( Jackson et al. 2013 ; U.S. EPA 2015d ). The “Environmental Quality Index” (EQI) provides a metric for overall environmental quality that incorporates air, water, land, the built environment, and sociodemographics ( U.S. EPA 2014a ).

Develop and assess options. This step helps inform understanding of the consequences of potential decisions under consideration. The benefits and risks of options should be assessed and tradeoffs and costs (monetary and nonmonetary) should be examined under different scenarios. The priorities and concerns of the community and stakeholders should be considered. This step also includes estimating the distribution of impacts or consequences (positive and negative) across the population, including at-risk populations such as children, older adults, pregnant and nursing women, and indigenous people, while considering population vulnerability versus individual risk. At this point, feasible near- and long-term actions that mitigate negative impacts and promote sustainability and resiliency are identified. A variety of traditional and newer tools can be applied. For example, human health and ecological risk assessment will add valuable information about the impacts of various stressors. HIA can provide a structure for assembling information and assessing options, as can structured decision-making ( Gregory et al. 2012 ; Yee et al. 2015 ). A web-based decision analysis framework called “Decision Analysis for a Sustainable Environment, Economy, and Society” (DASEES) can help inform this process ( Yeardley et al. 2011 ). Environmental justice analysis, using mapping tools like C-FERST, EnviroAtlas, and “EJ-SCREEN: Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool” ( http://www.epa.gov/ejscreen ), can provide valuable information about sensitive populations and population risk.

Implement sustainable solutions. Here, the suite of actions to implement solution(s) is selected. Solutions may range from improved infrastructure to interventions to behavioral changes. Implementers may include government agencies, state or local governments, or other stakeholders. These actions might include short- or long-term elements such as installation of a green street to reduce localized flooding combined with development of an area-wide plan for green infrastructure to improve overall water flow in a community. Communicating the scientific basis of solutions to decision makers, communities, and other stakeholders is essential. Ensuring transparency is crucial, as is engaging and empowering communities with knowledge, tools, data, and information.

Monitor and evaluate results. This step evaluates whether the approach provided sufficient information to identify, compare, and implement solutions and whether the chosen solution has the desired short- and long-term positive effects. Certain indicators or data sets could be used to reflect changes in environmental conditions or human health and well-being over time. For example, the “EPA Report on the Environment” provides indicators of national trends in air, water, land, human exposure and health, and ecological condition ( U.S. EPA 2015c ), and the EQI provides a single index of environmental quality that accounts for the multiple domains of the environment that encompass an area where humans interact ( Lobdell et al. 2011 ). The “EnviroAtlas” may be useful for monitoring and evaluating solutions at various spatial scales. Consideration should also be given to whether unconventional data sources—such as citizen science—can inform evaluation.

Environmental protection in today’s world requires recognition of the interconnection of our environmental systems. This framework provides a structure to address today’s complex problems by considering multiple dimensions and a variety of data sources—a systems approach. Similar frameworks exist and have provided the basis for this approach ( Reis et al. 2013 ; Powers et al. 2012 ; Briggs 2008 ). However, this framework represents an evolution of what has been proposed and used to date, and it provides a construct through which environmental and public health scientists can conduct future research, both fundamental and translational, to inform tomorrow’s solutions. We acknowledge the tension between using this framework and traditional approaches, including those driven by regulatory statutes and policies. We are not recommending replacement of those policies that have led to measurable progress. Rather, we recommend systems thinking as a path to enrichment of the scientific basis for decision-making to address wicked problems by creating opportunities for new partnerships and enhancing collaboration across traditional media-specific silos.

Recommendations for Framework Implementation

• Problem formulation as a key step toward integrating science to support systems-based problem solving. The framework presented here is grounded in strong problem formulation. This step is essential for successfully assessing issues and formulating and evaluating options. The environmental science community should be trained in approaches to problem formulation, and environmental and public health organizations should seek opportunities to incorporate problem formulation in their scientific approaches.
• Integrate additional skill sets into environmental problem solving. Informing solutions to complex environmental problems requires insight, expertise, and viewpoints from many scientific disciplines, along with policy makers, public officials, and community stakeholders. Traditionally, the fields of ecology, toxicology, and engineering have been predominant in environmental science. To conduct systems-based science, scientific teams will also need to include public health practitioners, earth scientists, economists, behavioral and other social scientists, database managers, programmers, software engineers, planners, physicians, systems analysts/experts, and science communicators.
• Make systems approaches core in the education of future scientists and decision-makers. Traditional training in environmental science has taken a reductionist approach to focus on specific mechanisms of a stressor and its effect on an ecosystem or human health. However, science students today are increasingly trained to look at the system and embrace cross-disciplinary problem solving. Current and future environmental scientists will need to be trained on systems approaches for conducting science and solving problems. A compilation of systems-based tools and examples of how systems approaches can be applied to inform sustainable solutions will help ensure that environmental scientists are adequately trained.
• Use effective science communication to ensure that decision makers and communities understand and accept the science. This framework requires scientists to work closely with vested partners and decision makers and ensure the science is translated and communicated throughout the process. As with the division of risk assessment and risk management articulated by NRC (1983) , scientists typically do not choose a solution or make a policy or risk management decision. Therefore, it is critical that the science is communicated clearly and that decision-makers and vested partners are educated about the science. Science communication experts will be needed, and scientists will need to be better trained in effective communication.

Conclusions

U.S. EPA authorities have successfully managed gross pollution problems using command and control media-specific approaches. The health of our rivers has improved, the vast majority of Americans have access to safe and clean drinking water, exposure to many toxic pollutants and pesticides has been reduced, and nationwide air quality has improved significantly for many air pollutants ( U.S. EPA 2012 ). However, today’s environmental problems are daunting. Their dimensions go well beyond the traditional risk assessment and risk management paradigm that has been the basis of environmental protection over the past several decades. It is time to embrace a new way of thinking. From safe drinking water to energy choices and pest management, to urban design, systems approaches can help inform sustainable solutions that ensure environmental and public health protection. In times of emergency response, systems approaches will help us understand the multiple dimensions of the situation, how the environment and human health are impacted, and how various solutions may address the issue or potentially cause unanticipated consequences. Wicked problems require thoughtful synthesis of science and decision-making. The framework proposed here provides a much-needed structure, grounded in strong problem formulation, to build upon our progress and strengthen environmental and public health protection for the future.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the following individuals: K. Brooks, former Acting Assistant Administrator, Office of Administration and Resources Management, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for his insights into and references about the history of the U.S. EPA; S. Edwards and R. Hines of the U.S. EPA for Figure 1, which was used to describe the underpinning of the systems framework research at the National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory, U.S. EPA; and J. Havel at SRA International, Inc. for the design of Figure 1.

The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. EPA.

The authors declare they have no actual or potential competing financial interests.

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15 Biggest Environmental Problems of 2024

While the climate crisis has many factors that play a role in the exacerbation of the environment, some warrant more attention than others. Here are some of the biggest environmental problems of our lifetime, from deforestation and biodiversity loss to food waste and fast fashion.

1. Global Warming From Fossil Fuels

2023 was the hottest year on record , with global average temperatures at 1.46C above pre-industrial levels and 0.13C higher than the eleven-month average for 2016, currently the warmest calendar year on record. The year was marked by six record-breaking months and two record-breaking seasons.

What’s more, carbon dioxide (CO2) levels have never been so high . After being consistently around 280 parts per million (ppm) for almost 6,000 years of human civilisation, CO2 levels in the atmosphere are now well above 420 ppm, more than double what they were before the onset of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. According to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Administrator Rick Spinrad, the steady annual increase is a “direct result of human activity,” mainly from the burning of fossil fuels for transportation and electricity generation but also from cement manufacturing, deforestation , and  agriculture .

This is undoubtedly one of the biggest environmental problems of our lifetime: as greenhouse gas emissions blanket the Earth, they trap the sun’s heat, leading to global warming.

Increased emissions of greenhouse gases have led to a rapid and steady increase in global temperatures, which in turn is  causing catastrophic events all over the world – from Australia and the US experiencing some of the most devastating bushfire seasons ever recorded, locusts swarming across parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia, decimating crops, and a heatwave in Antarctica that saw temperatures rise above 20C for the first time. S cientists are constantly warning that the planet has crossed a series of tipping points that could have catastrophic consequences, such as  advancing permafrost melt in Arctic regions, the Greenland ice sheet melting at an unprecedented rate, accelerating sixth mass extinction , and increasing deforestation in the Amazon rainforest , just to name a few.

The climate crisis is causing tropical storms and other weather events such as hurricanes, heatwaves and flooding to be more intense and frequent than seen before. However, even if all greenhouse gas emissions were halted immediately, global temperatures would continue to rise in the coming years. That is why it is absolutely imperative that we start now to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, invest in renewable energy sources, and phase our fossil fuels as fast as possible.

You might also like: The Tipping Points of Climate Change: How Will Our World Change?

2. Poor Governance

According to economists like Nicholas Stern, the climate crisis is a result of multiple market failures .

Economists and environmentalists have urged policymakers for years to increase the price of activities that emit greenhouse gases (one of our biggest environmental problems), the lack of which constitutes the largest market failure, for example through carbon taxes, which will stimulate innovations in low-carbon technologies.

To cut emissions quickly and effectively enough, governments must not only massively increase funding for green innovation to bring down the costs of low-carbon energy sources, but they also need to adopt a range of other policies that address each of the other market failures. 

A national carbon tax is currently implemented in 27 countries around the world , including various countries in the EU, Canada, Singapore, Japan, Ukraine and Argentina. However, according to the 2019 OECD Tax Energy Use report, current tax structures are not adequately aligned with the pollution profile of energy sources. For example, the OECD suggests that carbon taxes are not harsh enough on coal production, although it has proved to be effective for the electricity industry. A carbon tax has been effectively implemented in Sweden ; the carbon tax is U$127 per tonne and has reduced emissions by 25% since 1995, while its economy has expanded 75% in the same time period. 

Further, organisations such as the United Nations are not fit to deal with the climate crisis: it was assembled to prevent another world war and is not fit for purpose. Anyway, members of the UN are not mandated to comply with any suggestions or recommendations made by the organisation. For example, the Paris Agreement , a historic deal within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), says that countries need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions significantly so that global temperature rise is below 2C by 2100, and ideally under 1.5C. But signing on to it is voluntary, and there are no real repercussions for non-compliance. Further, the issue of equity remains a contentious issue whereby developing countries are allowed to emit more in order to develop to the point where they can develop technologies to emit less, and it allows some countries, such as China, to exploit this. 

3. Food Waste

A third of the food intended for human consumption – around 1.3 billion tons – is wasted or lost. This is enough to feed 3 billion people. Food waste and loss account for approximately one-quarter of greenhouse gas emissions annually ; if it was a country, food waste would be the third-largest emitter  of greenhouse gases, behind China and the US. 

Food waste and loss occurs at different stages in developing and developed countries; in developing countries, 40% of food waste occurs at the post-harvest and processing levels, while in developed countries, 40% of food waste occurs at the retail and consumer levels. 

At the retail level, a shocking amount of food is wasted because of aesthetic reasons; in fact, in the US, more than 50% of all produce thrown away in the US is done so because it is deemed to be “too ugly” to be sold to consumers- this amounts to about 60 million tons of fruits and vegetables. This leads to food insecurity , another one of the biggest environmental problems on the list. 

You might also like: How Does Food Waste Affect the Environment?

4. Biodiversity Loss

The past 50 years have seen a rapid growth of human consumption, population, global trade and urbanisation, resulting in humanity using more of the Earth’s resources than it can replenish naturally. 

A 2020 WWF report found that the population sizes of mammals, fish, birds, reptiles and amphibians have experienced a decline of an average of 68% between 1970 and 2016. The report attributes this biodiversity loss to a variety of factors, but mainly land-use change, particularly the conversion of habitats, like forests, grasslands and mangroves, into agricultural systems. Animals such as pangolins, sharks and seahorses are significantly affected by the illegal wildlife trade, and pangolins are critically endangered because of it. 

More broadly, a recent analysis has found that the sixth mass extinction of wildlife on Earth is accelerating. More than 500 species of land animals are on the brink of extinction and are likely to be lost within 20 years; the same number were lost over the whole of the last century. The scientists say that without the human destruction of nature, this rate of loss would have taken thousands of years. 

In Antarctica, climate change-triggered melting of sea ice is taking a heavy toll on emperor penguins and could wipe out entire populations by as early as 2100 , according to 2023 research.

You might also like: The Remarkable Benefits of Biodiversity

5. Plastic Pollution

In 1950, the world produced more than 2 million tons of plastic per year . By 2015, this annual production swelled to 419 million tons and exacerbating plastic waste in the environment. 

A report by science journal, Nature, determined that currently, roughly 14 million tons of plastic make their way into the oceans every year, harming wildlife habitats and the animals that live in them. The research found that if no action is taken, the plastic crisis will grow to 29 million metric tons per year by 2040. If we include microplastics into this, the cumulative amount of plastic in the ocean could reach 600 million tons by 2040.

Shockingly, National Geographic found that 91% of all plastic that has ever been made is not recycled, representing not only one of the biggest environmental problems of our lifetime, but another massive market failure. Considering that plastic takes 400 years to decompose, it will be many generations until it ceases to exist. There’s no telling what the irreversible effects of plastic pollution will have on the environment in the long run. 

You might also like: 8 Shocking Plastic Pollution Statistics to Know About

6. Deforestation

Every hour, forests the size of 300 football fields are cut down. By the year 2030, the planet might have only 10% of its forests; if deforestation isn’t stopped, they could all be gone in less than 100 years. 

The three countries experiencing the highest levels of deforestation are Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Indonesia. The Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest – spanning 6.9 million square kilometres (2.72 million square miles) and covering around 40% of the South American continent – is also one of the most biologically diverse ecosystems and is home to about three million species of plants and animals . Despite efforts to protect forest land, legal deforestation is still rampant, and about one-third of global tropical deforestation occurs in Brazil’s Amazon forest, amounting to 1.5 million hectares each year . 

Agriculture is the leading cause of deforestation, another one of the biggest environmental problems appearing on this list. Land is cleared to raise livestock or to plant other crops that are sold, such as sugar cane and palm oil . Besides for carbon sequestration, forests help to prevent soil erosion, because the tree roots bind the soil and prevent it from washing away, which also prevents landslides. 

You might also like: 10 Deforestation Facts You Should Know About

7. Air Pollution 

One of the biggest environmental problems today is outdoor air pollution .

Data from the World Health Organization (WHO) shows that an estimated 4.2 to 7 million people die from air pollution worldwide every year and that nine out of 10 people breathe air that contains high levels of pollutants. In Africa, 258,000 people died as a result of outdoor air pollution in 2017, up from 164,000 in 1990, according to UNICEF . Causes of air pollution mostly comes from industrial sources and motor vehicles, as well as emissions from burning biomass and poor air quality due to dust storms. 

According to a 2023 study, air pollution in South Asia – one of the most polluted areas in the world – cuts life expectancy by about 5 years . The study blames a series of factors, including a lack of adequate infrastructure and funding for the high levels of pollution in some countries. Most countries in Asia and Africa, which together contribute about 92.7% of life years lost globally due to air pollution, lack key air quality standards needed to develop adequate policies. Moreover, just 6.8% and 3.7% of governments in the two continents, respectively, provide their citizens with fully open-air quality data.

In Europe, a recent report by the European Environment Agency (EEA) showed that more than half a million people living in the European Union died from health issues directly linked to toxic pollutants exposure in 2021.

More on the topic: Less Than 1% of Global Land Area Has Safe Air Pollution Levels: Study

8. Melting Ice Caps and Sea Level Rise

The climate crisis is warming the Arctic more than twice as fast as anywhere else on the planet. Today, sea levels are rising more than twice as quickly as they did for most of the 20th century as a result of increasing temperatures on Earth. Seas are now rising an average of 3.2 mm per year globally and they will continue to grow up to about 0.7 metres by the end of this century. In the Arctic, the Greenland Ice Sheet poses the greatest risk for sea levels because melting land ice is the main cause of rising sea levels.

Representing arguably the biggest of the environmental problems, this is made all the more concerning considering that last year’s summer triggered the loss of 60 billion tons of ice from Greenland, enough to raise global sea levels by 2.2mm in just two months . According to satellite data, the Greenland ice sheet lost a record amount of ice in 2019: an average of a million tons per minute throughout the year, one of the biggest environmental problems that has cascading effects. If the entire Greenland ice sheet melts, sea level would rise by six metres .

Meanwhile, the Antarctic continent contributes about 1 millimetre per year to sea level rise, which is one-third of the annual global increase. According to 2023 data, the continent has lost approximately 7.5 trillion tons of ice since 1997 . Additionally, the last fully intact ice shelf in Canada in the Arctic recently collapsed, having lost about 80 square kilometres – or 40% – of its area over a two-day period in late July, according to the Canadian Ice Service .  

Sea level rise will have a devastating impact on those living in coastal regions: according to research and advocacy group Climate Central, sea level rise this century could flood coastal areas that are now home to 340 million to 480 million people , forcing them to migrate to safer areas and contributing to overpopulation and strain of resources in the areas they migrate to. Bangkok (Thailand), Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam), Manila (Philippines), and Dubai (United Arab Emirates) are among the cities most at risk of sea level rise and flooding.

You might also like: Two-Thirds of World’s Glaciers Set to Disappear by 2100 Under Current Global Warming Scenario

9. Ocean Acidification

Global temperature rise has not only affected the surface, but it is the main cause of ocean acidification . Our oceans absorb about 30% of carbon dioxide that is released into the Earth’s atmosphere. As higher concentrations of carbon emissions are released thanks to human activities such as burning fossil fuels as well as effects of global climate change such as increased rates of wildfires, so do the amount of carbon dioxide that is absorbed back into the sea. 

The smallest change in the pH scale can have a significant impact on the acidity of the ocean. Ocean acidification has devastating impacts on marine ecosystems and species, its food webs, and provoke irreversible changes in habitat quality . Once pH levels reach too low, marine organisms such as oysters, their shells and skeleton could even start to dissolve. 

However, one of the biggest environmental problems from ocean acidification is coral bleaching and subsequent coral reef loss . This is a phenomenon that occurs when rising ocean temperatures disrupt the symbiotic relationship between the reefs and algae that lives within it, driving away the algae and causing coral reefs to lose their natural vibrant colours. Some scientists have estimated coral reefs are at risk of being completely wiped by 2050. Higher acidity in the ocean would obstruct coral reef systems’ ability to rebuild their exoskeletons and recover from these coral bleaching events. 

Some studies have also found that ocean acidification can be linked as one of the effects of plastic pollution in the ocean. The accumulating bacteria and microorganisms derived from plastic garbage dumped in the ocean to damage marine ecosystems and contribute towards coral bleaching.

10. Agriculture 

Studies have shown that the global food system is responsible for up to one-third of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, of which 30% comes from livestock and fisheries. Crop production releases greenhouse gases such as nitrous oxide through the use of fertilisers . 

60% of the world’s agricultural area is dedicated to cattle ranching , although it only makes up 24% of global meat consumption. 

Agriculture not only covers a vast amount of land, but it also consumes a vast amount of freshwater, another one of the biggest environmental problems on this list. While arable lands and grazing pastures cover one-third of Earth’s land surfaces , they consume three-quarters of the world’s limited freshwater resources.

Scientists and environmentalists have continuously warned that we need to rethink our current food system; switching to a more plant-based diet would dramatically reduce the carbon footprint of the conventional agriculture industry. 

You might also like: The Future of Farming: Can We Feed the World Without Destroying It?

11. Food and Water Insecurity

Rising temperatures and unsustainable farming practices have resulted in increasing water and food insecurity.

Globally, more than 68 billion tonnes of top-soil is eroded every year at a rate 100 times faster than it can naturally be replenished. Laden with biocides and fertiliser, the soil ends up in waterways where it contaminates drinking water and protected areas downstream. 

Furthermore, exposed and lifeless soil is more vulnerable to wind and water erosion due to lack of root and mycelium systems that hold it together. A key contributor to soil erosion is over-tilling: although it increases productivity in the short-term by mixing in surface nutrients (e.g. fertiliser), tilling is physically destructive to the soil’s structure and in the long-term leads to soil compaction, loss of fertility and surface crust formation that worsens topsoil erosion.

With the global population expected to reach 9 billion people by mid-century, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) projects that global food demand may increase by 70% by 2050 . Around the world, more than 820 million people do not get enough to eat. 

The UN secretary-general António Guterres says, “Unless immediate action is taken, it is increasingly clear that there is an impending global food security emergency that could have long term impacts on hundreds of millions of adults and children.” He urged for countries to rethink their food systems and encouraged more sustainable farming practices. 

In terms of water security, only 3% of the world’s water is freshwater , and two-thirds of that is tucked away in frozen glaciers or otherwise unavailable for our use. As a result, some 1.1 billion people worldwide lack access to water, and a total of 2.7 billion find water scarce for at least one month of the year. By 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population may face water shortages. 

You might also like: Global Food Security: Why It Matters in 2023

12. Fast Fashion and Textile Waste

The global demand for fashion and clothing has risen at an unprecedented rate that the fashion industry now accounts for 10% of global carbon emissions, becoming one of the biggest environmental problems of our time. Fashion alone produces more greenhouse gas emissions than both the aviation and shipping sectors combined , and nearly 20% of global wastewater, or around 93 billion cubic metres from textile dyeing, according to the UN Environment Programme.

What’s more, the world at least generated an estimated 92 million tonnes of textiles waste every year and that number is expected to soar up to 134 million tonnes a year by 2030. Discarded clothing and textile waste, most of which is non-biodegradable, ends up in landfills, while microplastics from clothing materials such as polyester, nylon, polyamide, acrylic and other synthetic materials, is leeched into soil and nearby water sources. Monumental amounts of clothing textile are also dumped in less developed countries as seen with Chile’s Atacama , the driest desert in the world, where at least 39,000 tonnes of textile waste from other nations are left there to rot.

This rapidly growing issue is only exacerbated by the ever-expanding fast fashion business model, in which companies relies on cheap and speedy production of low quality clothing to meet the latest and newest trends. While the United Nations Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action sees signatory fashion and textile companies to commit to achieving net zero emission by 2050, a majority of businesses around the world have yet to address their roles in climate change.

While these are some of the biggest environmental problems plaguing our planet, there are many more that have not been mentioned, including overfishing, urban sprawl, toxic superfund sites and land use changes. While there are many facets that need to be considered in formulating a response to the crisis, they must be coordinated, practical and far-reaching enough to make enough of a difference. 

You might also like: Fast Fashion and Its Environmental Impact

13. Overfishing

Over three billion people around the world rely on fish as their primary source of protein. About 12% of the world relies upon fisheries in some form or another, with 90% of these being small-scale fishermen – think a small crew in a boat, not a ship, using small nets or even rods and reels and lures not too different from the kind you probably use . Of the 18.9 million fishermen in the world, 90% of them fall under the latter category.

Most people consume approximately twice as much food as they did 50 years ago and there are four times as many people on earth as there were at the close of the 1960s. This is one driver of the 30% of commercially fished waters being classified as being ‘overfished’. This means that the stock of available fishing waters is being depleted faster than it can be replaced.

Overfishing comes with detrimental effects on the environment, including increased algae in the water, destruction of fishing communities, ocean littering as well as extremely high rates of biodiversity loss.

As part of the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 14) , the UN and FAO are working towards maintaining the proportion of fish stocks within biologically sustainable levels. This, however, requires much stricter regulations of the world’s oceans than the ones already in place. In July 2022, the WTO banned fishing subsidies to reduce global overfishing in a historic deal. Indeed, subsidies for fuel, fishing gear, and building new vessels, only incentivise overfishing and represent thus a huge problem. 

You might also like: 7 Solutions to Overfishing We Need Right Now

14. Cobalt Mining

Cobalt is quickly becoming the defining example of the mineral conundrum at the heart of the renewable energy transition . As a key component of battery materials that power electric vehicles (EVs), cobalt is facing a sustained surge in demand as decarbonisation efforts progress. The  world’s largest cobalt supplier is the Democratic Republic of Congo  (DRC), where it is estimated that up to a fifth of the production is produced through artisanal miners.

Cobalt mining , however, is associated with  dangerous workers’ exploitation and other serious environmental and social issues. The environmental costs of cobalt mining activities are also substantial. Southern regions of the DRC are not only home to cobalt and copper, but also large amounts of uranium. In mining regions, scientists have made note of high radioactivity levels. In addition, mineral mining, similar to other industrial mining efforts, often produces pollution that leaches into neighbouring rivers and water sources. Dust from pulverised rock is known to cause breathing problems for local communities as well.

15. Soil Degradation

Organic matter is a crucial component of soil as it allows it to absorb carbon from the atmosphere. Plants absorb CO2 from the air naturally and effectively through photosynthesis and part of this carbon is stored in the soil as  soil organic carbon (SOC). Healthy soil has a minimum of 3-6% organic matter. However, almost everywhere in the world, the content is much lower than that.

According to the United Nations, about 40% of the planet’s soil is degraded . Soil degradation refers to the loss of organic matter, changes in its structural condition and/or decline in soil fertility and it is often the result of human activities, such as traditional farming practices including the use of toxic chemicals and pollutants. If business as usual continued through 2050, experts project additional degradation of an area almost the size of South America. But there is more to it. If we do not change our reckless practices and step up to preserve soil health, food security for billions of people around the world will be irreversibly compromised, with an estimated 40% less food  expected to be produced in 20 years’ time despite the world’s population projected to reach 9.3 billion people.

Featured image by Earth.Org Photographer Roy Mangersnes

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Environmental Issues Research Paper Topics

Designed to serve as a comprehensive guide for students, this page provides a wide array of environmental issues research paper topics . Whether you are just starting your course or are looking for a unique topic for your final project, you will find a wealth of ideas here. The topics are divided into ten categories, each featuring ten distinct research ideas, offering a diverse range of issues to explore. Additionally, you will find expert advice on how to select a suitable topic and how to write an impactful research paper on environmental issues. The page also introduces iResearchNet’s professional writing services, which can assist students in creating high-quality, custom research papers on any environmental issue.

100 Environmental Issues Research Paper Topics

The field of environmental science is vast and interrelated to so many other academic disciplines like civil engineering, law, and even healthcare. That is why it is imperative to create a comprehensive and engaging list of environmental issues research paper topics. These topics are not only necessary for your academic career, but they also provide valuable insights into the current state of our planet and the steps we can take to mitigate the adverse effects of human activities.

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Climate Change

• The Impact of Climate Change on Biodiversity
• Climate Change and Agriculture
• The Role of Renewable Energy in Mitigating Climate Change
• Climate Change and Public Health
• Climate Change and Migration
• Climate Change and Natural Disasters
• Climate Change and Water Resources
• Climate Change and Food Security
• Climate Change and Urbanization
• Climate Change and Marine Life

Air Pollution

• The Effects of Air Pollution on Human Health
• Air Pollution and Climate Change
• The Role of Transportation in Air Pollution
• Air Pollution and Ecosystems
• Indoor Air Pollution
• Air Pollution and Policy
• Air Pollution and Energy Production
• Air Pollution and Urban Planning
• Air Pollution and Agriculture
• Air Pollution and Waste Management

Water Pollution

• The Impact of Water Pollution on Marine Life
• Water Pollution and Human Health
• Industrial Waste and Water Pollution
• Water Pollution and Agriculture
• Water Pollution and Policy
• Water Pollution and Waste Management
• Water Pollution and Climate Change
• Water Pollution and Urbanization
• Water Pollution and Food Security
• Water Pollution and Biodiversity

Soil Erosion

• The Impact of Soil Erosion on Agriculture
• Soil Erosion and Climate Change
• Soil Erosion and Deforestation
• Soil Erosion and Urbanization
• Soil Erosion and Water Pollution
• Soil Erosion and Desertification
• Soil Erosion and Biodiversity
• Soil Erosion and Policy
• Soil Erosion and Land Management
• Soil Erosion and Food Security

Deforestation

• The Impact of Deforestation on Biodiversity
• Deforestation and Climate Change
• Deforestation and Soil Erosion
• Deforestation and Urbanization
• Deforestation and Agriculture
• Deforestation and Policy
• Deforestation and Land Management
• Deforestation and Indigenous Rights
• Deforestation and Water Cycle
• Deforestation and Carbon Cycle

Biodiversity Loss

• The Impact of Biodiversity Loss on Ecosystem Services
• Biodiversity Loss and Climate Change
• Biodiversity Loss and Agriculture
• Biodiversity Loss and Deforestation
• Biodiversity Loss and Urbanization
• Biodiversity Loss and Policy
• Biodiversity Loss and Invasive Species
• Biodiversity Loss and Extinction
• Biodiversity Loss and Conservation
• Biodiversity Loss and Genetic Diversity

Waste Management

• The Impact of Waste Management on Public Health
• Waste Management and Climate Change
• Waste Management and Policy
• Waste Management and Urbanization
• Waste Management and Water Pollution
• Waste Management and Soil Pollution
• Waste Management and Air Pollution
• Waste Management and Recycling
• Waste Management and Landfills
• Waste Management and Plastic Pollution

Energy Consumption

• The Impact of Energy Consumption on Climate Change
• Energy Consumption and Air Pollution
• Energy Consumption and Policy
• Energy Consumption and Urbanization
• Energy Consumption and Transportation
• Energy Consumption and Renewable Energy
• Energy Consumption and Fossil Fuels
• Energy Consumption and Energy Efficiency
• Energy Consumption and Economic Growth
• Energy Consumption and Lifestyle

Overpopulation

• The Impact of Overpopulation on Natural Resources
• Overpopulation and Climate Change
• Overpopulation and Urbanization
• Overpopulation and Food Security
• Overpopulation and Water Scarcity
• Overpopulation and Biodiversity Loss
• Overpopulation and Policy
• Overpopulation and Public Health
• Overpopulation and Migration
• Overpopulation and Social Inequality

Ozone Layer Depletion

• The Impact of Ozone Layer Depletion on Human Health
• Ozone Layer Depletion and Climate Change
• Ozone Layer Depletion and Marine Life
• Ozone Layer Depletion and Policy
• Ozone Layer Depletion and Air Pollution
• Ozone Layer Depletion and UV Radiation
• Ozone Layer Depletion and Agriculture
• Ozone Layer Depletion and Skin Cancer
• Ozone Layer Depletion and Eye Diseases
• Ozone Layer Depletion and Ecosystems

This comprehensive list of environmental issues research paper topics provides a wide range of areas to choose from for your research. The topics cover major environmental issues, from climate change and air pollution to biodiversity loss and overpopulation. Each of these topics can be explored from various angles, providing a rich source of ideas for your research paper. Remember, the key to a successful research paper is a well-defined topic and a clear focus.

Environmental Issues Research Guide

Welcome to the world of environmental science, a discipline that focuses on understanding and addressing the complex challenges our planet faces today. As our society becomes increasingly aware of the critical importance of environmental sustainability, the study of environmental science has gained immense significance. In this page, we delve into the realm of environmental issues research paper topics, providing students like you with a wealth of ideas, guidance, and resources to embark on impactful research journeys.

Environmental issues, ranging from climate change to biodiversity loss, deforestation, pollution, and resource depletion, pose serious threats to our planet’s well-being. The need for in-depth research, innovative solutions, and informed decision-making has never been more urgent. As students of environmental science, you have a unique opportunity to contribute to this field of study by conducting research papers that explore various aspects of environmental issues. These research papers serve as a platform for understanding the complexities of environmental problems and proposing viable solutions.

The purpose of this page is to empower you in your research endeavors by providing a comprehensive list of environmental issues research paper topics. We recognize that choosing a suitable research topic is a critical step in the research process, and it can significantly impact the outcome and relevance of your work. Moreover, we understand the challenges students face when trying to navigate the vast landscape of environmental issues and find a research topic that aligns with their interests and goals. That’s why we are here to offer expert advice and guidance to help you make informed decisions.

Whether you are a novice researcher exploring the world of environmental science or an experienced student seeking new avenues to expand your knowledge, this page is designed to cater to your needs. Our curated list of environmental issues research paper topics spans a wide range of categories, ensuring that you can find a topic that aligns with your specific interests and academic goals. Each topic has been carefully selected to reflect the current and pressing environmental challenges we face today, allowing you to delve into the intricacies and complexities of these issues.

Moreover, we understand that writing a research paper can be a daunting task, especially for students who are new to the process or grappling with time constraints. In addition to providing you with a comprehensive list of research paper topics, we also offer writing services that allow you to order a custom environmental issues research paper tailored to your unique requirements. Our team of expert degree-holding writers is well-versed in environmental science and has extensive experience in conducting research and crafting high-quality papers.

By availing our writing services, you can benefit from the expertise of our writers, who will ensure that your research paper is meticulously researched, well-written, and aligned with the highest academic standards. We value the importance of in-depth research, customized solutions, and timely delivery. Our team is available 24/7 to provide support and address any queries or concerns you may have throughout the process. With our easy order tracking system, absolute privacy, and a money-back guarantee, you can trust us to deliver a top-quality research paper that meets your expectations.

Choosing an Environmental Issues Topic

Choosing the right environmental issues research paper topic is crucial for conducting meaningful and impactful research. With such a broad and diverse field, it can be challenging to narrow down your focus and select a topic that aligns with your interests, academic goals, and the current state of environmental science. In this section, we provide expert advice and guidance to help you navigate the process of selecting environmental issues research paper topics. Here are ten valuable tips to consider:

• Identify your areas of interest : Begin by reflecting on your personal interests within the field of environmental science. Consider the environmental issues that resonate with you the most and align with your long-term career goals. Are you passionate about climate change, water pollution, biodiversity conservation, or sustainable energy? Identifying your areas of interest will guide you towards topics that you genuinely care about.
• Stay updated on current environmental challenges : Stay informed about the current environmental challenges and emerging issues. Environmental science is a dynamic field, constantly evolving as new research and discoveries emerge. Subscribe to reputable environmental journals, attend conferences, and follow reputable sources to stay up-to-date with the latest environmental issues and debates. This will help you choose topics that are relevant and address the pressing concerns of the time.
• Consider the scope and depth of research : Evaluate the scope and depth of research required for each potential topic. Some topics may require extensive data collection, fieldwork, or laboratory experiments, while others may rely more on literature review and theoretical analysis. Consider your available resources, time constraints, and access to relevant data or research materials when selecting a topic that is feasible within the given parameters.
• Explore interdisciplinary approaches : Environmental issues are often complex and interconnected, requiring interdisciplinary perspectives. Consider topics that allow you to explore the intersections of environmental science with other disciplines such as economics, sociology, policy studies, or public health. Interdisciplinary research can provide a comprehensive understanding of environmental challenges and offer innovative solutions.
• Assess the significance and impact : Evaluate the significance and potential impact of each research topic. Ask yourself: Does the topic address a critical environmental issue? Does it have the potential to contribute to the existing body of knowledge or influence environmental policy and decision-making? Choosing a topic with significant implications can enhance the relevance and importance of your research.
• Consider local and global contexts : Environmental issues can vary in their local and global contexts. Consider topics that have relevance and implications at both scales. Local environmental issues may involve studying the impact of pollution on a specific ecosystem or analyzing the effectiveness of local environmental policies. Global topics could encompass climate change, deforestation, or biodiversity loss and their implications on a global scale.
• Seek guidance from faculty and experts : Consult with your faculty members, advisors, or experts in the field of environmental science. They can provide valuable insights, suggest potential research topics, and guide you towards relevant literature and resources. Their expertise and experience can help you refine your research focus and identify unique research angles.
• Conduct a preliminary literature review : Before finalizing your topic, conduct a preliminary literature review to familiarize yourself with existing research and identify research gaps. This will enable you to identify topics that have not been extensively explored or provide new perspectives on existing issues. A thorough literature review will also help you develop a solid research question and methodology.
• Consider the ethical implications : Environmental research often raises ethical considerations. Reflect on the potential ethical implications associated with your research topic. Consider how your research may impact communities, ecosystems, or vulnerable populations. Ensure that your research design and methodology prioritize ethical standards and promote the well-being of the environment and human communities.
• Stay flexible and open to refinement : Lastly, remain flexible and open to refining your research topic throughout the research process. As you delve deeper into your research, new insights and perspectives may emerge, leading you to adjust your focus or narrow down your research question. Embrace the iterative nature of research and allow yourself the freedom to adapt and refine your topic as needed.

By considering these ten expert tips, you can choose environmental issues research paper topics that align with your interests, contribute to the field of environmental science, and make a meaningful impact. Remember, selecting the right topic is the first step towards conducting a successful and rewarding research study.

How to Write an Environmental Issues Research Paper

Writing an environmental issues research paper requires careful planning, organization, and attention to detail. It involves conducting thorough research, analyzing data, and presenting your findings in a clear and compelling manner. In this section, we provide expert advice and ten valuable tips to guide you through the process of writing an environmental issues research paper.

• Understand the research question and objectives : Begin by thoroughly understanding the research question and objectives of your paper. Clearly define the scope and purpose of your study, ensuring that it aligns with the overall theme of environmental issues. This clarity will help you stay focused and maintain a logical flow throughout your paper.
• Conduct comprehensive literature review : Before diving into your research, conduct a comprehensive literature review. Familiarize yourself with existing studies, theories, and methodologies related to your chosen environmental issue. This will provide a foundation of knowledge and help you identify research gaps or areas where your study can contribute.
• Develop a solid research methodology : Design a robust research methodology that aligns with your research question and objectives. Determine the appropriate data collection methods, such as surveys, interviews, field observations, or laboratory experiments. Consider the ethical implications of your research and ensure compliance with ethical guidelines.
• Collect and analyze data : Collect relevant data using your chosen research methods. Ensure data integrity and accuracy by using standardized data collection techniques. Analyze the data using appropriate statistical or qualitative analysis methods, depending on the nature of your research.
• Organize your paper effectively : Create a clear and logical structure for your research paper. Organize it into sections such as introduction, literature review, methodology, results, discussion, and conclusion. Use headings and subheadings to guide the reader and make the paper easy to navigate.
• Write a compelling introduction : Begin your paper with an engaging introduction that provides background information on the environmental issue and highlights the significance of your research. Clearly state your research question or hypothesis and provide an overview of your methodology and key findings.
• Present your findings objectively : Present your research findings objectively, using appropriate data visualization techniques such as tables, graphs, or charts. Clearly interpret the results and explain their implications for the environmental issue you’re studying. Support your findings with references to relevant literature.
• Engage in critical analysis and discussion : Engage in critical analysis and discussion of your findings. Compare your results with existing research, highlight similarities, differences, or inconsistencies, and discuss possible reasons for these variations. Evaluate the strengths and limitations of your study and suggest areas for future research.
• Use clear and concise language : Communicate your ideas clearly and concisely. Avoid jargon and use plain language that is accessible to a wide audience. Define technical terms if necessary and ensure that your arguments and explanations are easy to follow.
• Craft a compelling conclusion : End your research paper with a strong conclusion that summarizes your key findings, reinforces the significance of your research, and suggests avenues for further exploration. Emphasize the implications of your study for addressing the environmental issue and provide recommendations for future actions or policies.

By following these ten expert tips, you can effectively write an environmental issues research paper that is well-structured, supported by solid evidence, and contributes to the field of environmental science. Remember to revise and proofread your paper for clarity, coherence, and grammar before submitting it for review.

Custom Research Paper Writing Services

When it comes to writing a research paper on environmental issues, we understand that students may face challenges in terms of time, resources, and expertise. That’s why iResearchNet offers professional writing services to assist students in their academic journey. Our team of expert writers, experienced in environmental science and research, is ready to provide customized solutions to meet your specific needs. Here are 13 key features of our writing services:

• Expert Degree-Holding Writers : Our writing team consists of expert degree-holding writers with extensive knowledge and experience in the field of environmental science. They possess the expertise to tackle complex environmental issues and deliver high-quality research papers.
• Custom Written Works : We understand that every research paper is unique. Our writers will tailor your paper to your specific requirements, ensuring that it is customized and meets your academic standards.
• In-Depth Research : Our writers conduct thorough research to gather relevant and up-to-date information on the chosen environmental issue. They delve deep into scholarly resources, scientific journals, and credible databases to provide you with well-researched content.
• Custom Formatting : We adhere to various formatting styles, including APA, MLA, Chicago/Turabian, and Harvard. Our writers are well-versed in these formatting guidelines and will ensure that your research paper is formatted correctly.
• Top Quality : We prioritize delivering top-quality research papers that meet the highest academic standards. Our writers are committed to excellence and will strive to exceed your expectations.
• Customized Solutions : We understand that each research paper has unique requirements. Our writers will work closely with you to understand your specific needs and provide customized solutions that address your research objectives.
• Flexible Pricing : We offer flexible pricing options to accommodate students’ budgets. Our pricing structure is transparent, and we provide competitive rates for our high-quality writing services.
• Short Deadlines : We recognize that students often face tight deadlines. Our writers are equipped to handle urgent orders, offering short turnaround times of up to 3 hours while maintaining the quality of the research paper.
• Timely Delivery : We value punctuality and understand the importance of submitting your research paper on time. Our writers work diligently to ensure timely delivery, allowing you to meet your academic deadlines without stress.
• 24/7 Support : Our customer support team is available 24/7 to address your queries, provide updates on your order, and assist you throughout the writing process. We prioritize effective communication and timely responses to ensure a smooth and satisfactory experience.
• Absolute Privacy : We prioritize the privacy and confidentiality of our clients. Rest assured that all personal and order-related information will be handled securely and kept confidential.
• Easy Order Tracking : Our user-friendly platform allows you to easily track the progress of your order. You can stay informed about the status of your research paper, communicate with your assigned writer, and provide additional instructions if needed.
• Money Back Guarantee : We are committed to customer satisfaction. If, for any reason, you are not fully satisfied with the delivered research paper, we offer a money back guarantee, ensuring your investment is protected.

By availing our writing services, you can have peace of mind knowing that your environmental issues research paper is in capable hands. Our team of dedicated writers will deliver a customized and high-quality paper that meets your academic requirements and helps you excel in your studies.

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Confronting the ‘two-headed monster’ of environmental injustice

Scholars and community leaders gathered at an environmental justice conference to discuss the importance of community-driven research, intersectional frameworks, and institutional legitimacy.

Responding to global environmental change requires a more just and equitable approach to understanding the relationship between social and ecological systems, according to attendees of a recent conference at Stanford University on The Duality of Environmental Justice .

“We tend to think about the disproportionate impact of the harmful aspects of the environment – pollution, contamination, climate change, mining, and so on. I want to emphasize that the wonderful benefits from nature and the services that it provides – healthy food, clean water, clean air, recreation, spiritual life, and so on – are also subjected to this disproportionate impact,” said Rodolfo Dirzo , the associate dean for Integrative Initiatives in Environmental Justice at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and faculty organizer of the conference. This is the second year the conference has been offered and co-hosted by the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and Stanford Graduate School of Business .

Speakers presented 36 talks on March 18 and 19, outlining historical frameworks, challenging implicit assumptions, probing scholarly terminology, sharing findings and best practices, and grappling with the obstacles and opportunities ahead for environmental justice scholars.

Acknowledging and confronting systemic oppression

Multiple people who spoke at the conference identified the roots of environmental injustice in colonialism – the global occupation of Indigenous people’s lands and economic exploitation of the most vulnerable people and resources by predominantly white and Western Europeans.

That legacy was critical in shaping modern environmental discourse, said Maxine Burkett , a professor of law and policy at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She noted that some of the first authors to publish research using the term “climate justice” were lawyers and economists. These writers legitimized the use of cost-benefit analyses as the leading lens with which to evaluate harms and responsibility.

“The irony is that given the climate destabilization that we are orchestrating, the response that would preserve the international order is one that fundamentally reexamines the relationship between the Global North and South, attends to the needs of the most vulnerable, and understands the development of just responses in international law as part of this endeavor,” said Burkett.

Stanford researchers have employed a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze rights and representation in the aquatic foods industry globally. Their findings, published in Nature Food as part of the Blue Food Assessment , highlighted the failure of dominant development policies to create equitable outcomes rooted in human rights. “It was really clear that pursuing wealth benefits – for example, profits or exports – often comes at the expense of pursuing welfare benefits, like nutrition or livelihoods,” said Rosamond Naylor , a Stanford professor of environmental social sciences and lead author of the assessment.

Environmental justice offers an alternative lens, leaning into the wisdom and firsthand knowledge of communities who have been finding pathways to resilience for centuries.

Delving into duality

Marginalized communities are often the first to experience the harmful impacts of global environmental change and the last to have access to beneficial services that nature provides. In this way, environmental injustice is like a “two-headed monster,” said Dirzo, who is the Bing Professor in Environmental Science in the School of Humanities and Sciences . Speakers illuminated the multiple ways in which this duality rears its ugly heads, and in doing so challenged some common models of evaluating environmental impact.

Dena Montague , an environmental justice lecturer in the Earth Systems Program, described how Africa is one of the continents least responsible for carbon emissions and yet most vulnerable to climate change impacts. In addition to this disproportionate harm from historical emissions, Africa is also largely excluded from the benefits provided by its natural resources. The rare earth materials essential to achieving a clean energy transition are already being harvested and exported to non-African countries. 

Participants in the conference also explored how binary models can limit our ability to see how social and ecological issues are connected. Cities are vibrant cultural and population centers, often synonymous with the “concrete jungle” and human-engineered structures. Yet, urban centers also often contain habitats for native species; gardens provide a point of autonomy and food sovereignty for families; and parks foster creativity, inspiration, and rest. Chris Schell , an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, argued that the duality of environmental justice can also work positively. Urban biodiversity can act like a “shield” that provides essential services for human well-being, and in return, equitable, affordable urban housing that incorporates nature can bolster ecosystem health.

Consultation is necessary but not sufficient

In order to make progress on solutions, researchers will need to work directly with local communities on the frontlines of environmental impact.

Indigenous and Native stewardship has a millennia-old track record of sustainable environmental management, said Kyle Artelle , an assistant professor at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. The concept of “ two-eyed seeing ” positions both Indigenous knowledge and Western science as necessary and central to understanding complex environmental issues. Artelle expanded on this idea and flipped the traditional hierarchy on its head, offering a pathway where Western science and scholarship centers and supports Indigenous science, sovereignty, and government. Dirzo reported on how his group exemplifies this approach by meaningfully involving Zapotec Indigenous people in the co-design and co-execution of resource management programs.

In collaborating with local and Indigenous communities, consultation is the bare minimum, speakers said. Successful partnerships are built on trust, humility, and setting clear intentions – a relationship in the truest sense of the word.

Scholars offered practical guidance for researchers looking to work directly with communities: Leverage your network to provide connections and resources for leaders beyond yourself. Be ready to engage over the long term, carrying on relationships through generations. There is no substitute for time and sweat equity.

With an increasing emphasis on community-engaged research projects in academia, multiple attendees highlighted the importance of moving toward community-driven approaches, where researchers preferentially answer the questions that communities identify for themselves.

Art, anger, activism, and beyond

Speakers highlighted a number of approaches that can help uncover insights and perspectives sometimes left out of research methods like community surveys, interviews, modeling, and mapping.

Intersectionality – how multiple aspects of social and political identity overlap to create unique dynamics – is also a key framework. While race and socioeconomic status are often at the forefront of environmental justice issues, gender, citizenship, cultural practices, religion, and health conditions, among others, can also influence the inequitable distribution of environmental harms.

In addition to Western science and Indigenous knowledge, art also serves as a way of understanding the natural world and our human relationship to it.

“Storytelling on its own is about capturing one view of the truth. But collaborative storytelling is capturing multiple views of the same truth,” said Tanvi Dutta Gupta , a master’s student in the Earth Systems Program. “It’s approaching a more complete objectivity, more complete empathy, and more complete authenticity of being in the world, which allows us to create a more environmentally just future by holding these conflicts, compromises, and agreements together.”

Related: Art as a tool for environmental justice

Attendees discussed strategies to build legitimacy and institutional support for environmental justice research and scholarship, such as creating space for community, focusing on scaling out in addition to scaling up, and learning from past social movements.

Theresa Ong , an assistant professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth University, emphasized the importance of mentorship for students. She described her field of agroecology as “a science, a practice, and a movement,” where it can be difficult to navigate the tensions between academia and advocacy.

Several speakers highlighted that interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration is essential – even when it requires difficult conversations. “I have come to the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability because I believe that all of my work on inequality can no longer be understood without climate change,” said Michelle Anderson , a professor at Stanford Law School , who recently joined the newly formed Environmental Social Sciences Department . “It’s a premise of environmental justice at Stanford that if we all stay in our little silos, we can’t figure these problems out.”

Despite the challenges ahead for developing environmental justice research and scholarship, speakers also acknowledged the decades and centuries of work that previous researchers and leaders – from W.E.B. Dubois to those in the Environmental Justice Working Group at Stanford – have put into laying the groundwork.

What makes it possible to do this work is to do the work in community. We can stand on the shoulders of those scholars who have documented not just the methodology but the ethics behind it. ” Sibyl Diver Lecturer, Earth Systems Program

View the full list of conference speakers .

Rodolfo Dirzo is a professor of Earth system science in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and of biology in the School of Humanities and Sciences. He is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment .

Rosamond Naylor is the William Wrigley Professor in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. She is also a senior fellow at the Woods Institute and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies , and a professor, by courtesy, of economics and of Earth system science.

Michelle Anderson is the Larry Kramer Professor of Law. She is also a senior fellow at the Woods Institute.

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There’s an Explosion of Plastic Waste. Big Companies Say ‘We’ve Got This.’

Big brands like Procter & Gamble and Nestlé say a new generation of plants will help them meet environmental goals, but the technology is struggling to deliver.

Recycled polypropylene pellets at a PureCycle Technologies plant in Ironton, Ohio. Credit... Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

Supported by

By Hiroko Tabuchi

• Published April 5, 2024 Updated April 8, 2024

By 2025, Nestle promises not to use any plastic in its products that isn’t recyclable. By that same year, L’Oreal says all of its packaging will be “refillable, reusable, recyclable or compostable.”

And by 2030, Procter & Gamble pledges that it will halve its use of virgin plastic resin made from petroleum.

To get there, these companies and others are promoting a new generation of recycling plants, called “advanced” or “chemical” recycling, that promise to recycle many more products than can be recycled today.

So far, advanced recycling is struggling to deliver on its promise. Nevertheless, the new technology is being hailed by the plastics industry as a solution to an exploding global waste problem.

The traditional approach to recycling is to simply grind up and melt plastic waste. The new, advanced-recycling operators say they can break down the plastic much further, into more basic molecular building blocks, and transform it into new plastic.

PureCycle Technologies, a company that features prominently in Nestlé, L’Oréal, and Procter & Gamble’s plastics commitments, runs one such facility, a $500 million plant in Ironton, Ohio. The plant was originally to start operating in 2020 , with the capacity to process as much as 182 tons of discarded polypropylene, a hard-to-recycle plastic used widely in single-use cups, yogurt tubs, coffee pods and clothing fibers, every day.

But PureCycle’s recent months have instead been filled with setbacks: technical issues at the plant, shareholder lawsuits, questions over the technology and a startling report from contrarian investors who make money when a stock price falls. They said that they had flown a drone over the facility that showed that the plant was far from being able to make much new plastic.

PureCycle, based in Orlando, Fla., said it remained on track. “We’re ramping up production,” its chief executive, Dustin Olson, said during a recent tour of the plant, a constellation of pipes, storage tanks and cooling towers in Ironton, near the Ohio River. “We believe in this technology. We’ve seen it work,” he said. “We’re making leaps and bounds.”

Nestlé, Procter & Gamble and L’Oréal have also expressed confidence in PureCycle. L’Oréal said PureCycle was one of many partners developing a range of recycling technologies. P.&G. said it hoped to use the recycled plastic for “numerous packaging applications as they scale up production.” Nestlé didn’t respond to requests for comment, but has said it is collaborating with PureCycle on “groundbreaking recycling technologies.”

PureCycle’s woes are emblematic of broad trouble faced by a new generation of recycling plants that have struggled to keep up with the growing tide of global plastic production, which scientists say could almost quadruple by midcentury .

A chemical-recycling facility in Tigard, Ore., a joint venture between Agilyx and Americas Styrenics, is in the process of shutting down after millions of dollars in losses. A plant in Ashley, Ind., that had aimed to recycle 100,000 tons of plastic a year by 2021 had processed only 2,000 tons in total as of late 2023, after fires, oil spills and worker safety complaints.

At the same time, many of the new generation of recycling facilities are turning plastic into fuel, something the Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t consider to be recycling, though industry groups say some of that fuel can be turned into new plastic .

Overall, the advanced recycling plants are struggling to make a dent in the roughly 36 million tons of plastic Americans discard each year, which is more than any other country. Even if the 10 remaining chemical-recycling plants in America were to operate at full capacity, they would together process some 456,000 tons of plastic waste, according to a recent tally by Beyond Plastics , a nonprofit group that advocates stricter controls on plastics production. That’s perhaps enough to raise the plastic recycling rate — which has languished below 10 percent for decades — by a single percentage point.

For households, that has meant that much of the plastic they put out for recycling doesn’t get recycled at all, but ends up in landfills. Figuring out which plastics are recyclable and which aren’t has turned into, essentially, a guessing game . That confusion has led to a stream of non-recyclable trash contaminating the recycling process, gumming up the system.

“The industry is trying to say they have a solution,” said Terrence J. Collins, a professor of chemistry and sustainability science at Carnegie Mellon University. “It’s a non-solution.”

‘Molecular washing machine’

It was a long-awaited day last June at PureCycle’s Ironton facility: The company had just produced its first batch of what it describes as “ultra-pure” recycled polypropylene pellets.

That milestone came several years late and with more than $350 million in cost overruns. Still, the company appeared to have finally made it. “Nobody else can do this,” Jeff Kramer, the plant manager, told a local news crew .

PureCycle had done it by licensing a game-changing method — developed by Procter & Gamble researchers in the mid-2010s, but unproven at scale — that uses solvent to dissolve and purify the plastic to make it new again. “It’s like a molecular washing machine,” Mr. Olson said.

There’s a reason Procter & Gamble, Nestlé and L’Oréal, some of the world’s biggest users of plastic, are excited about the technology. Many of their products are made from polypropylene, a plastic that they transform into a plethora of products using dyes and fillers. P.&G. has said it uses more polypropylene than any other plastic, more than a half-million tons a year.

But those additives make recycling polypropylene more difficult.

The E.P.A. estimates that 2.7 percent of polypropylene packaging is reprocessed. But PureCycle was promising to take any polypropylene — disposable beer cups, car bumpers, even campaign signs — and remove the colors, odors, and contaminants to transform it into new plastic.

Soon after the June milestone, trouble hit.

On Sept. 13, PureCycle disclosed that its plant had suffered a power failure the previous month that had halted operations and caused a vital seal to fail. That meant the company would be unable to meet key milestones, it told lenders.

Then in November, Bleecker Street Research — a New York-based short-seller, an investment strategy that involves betting that a company’s stock price will fall — published a report asserting that the white pellets that had rolled off PureCycle’s line in June weren’t recycled from plastic waste. The short-sellers instead claimed that the company had simply run virgin polypropylene through the system as part of a demonstration run.

Mr. Olson said PureCycle hadn’t used consumer waste in the June 2023 run, but it hadn’t used virgin plastic, either. Instead it had used scrap known as “post industrial,” which is what’s left over from the manufacturing process and would otherwise go to a landfill, he said.

Bleecker Street also said it had flown heat-sensing drones over the facility and said it found few signs of commercial-scale activity. The firm also raised questions about the solvent PureCycle was using to break down the plastic, calling it “a nightmare concoction” that was difficult to manage.

PureCycle is now being sued by other investors who accuse the company of making false statements and misleading investors about its setbacks.

Mr. Olson declined to describe the solvent. Regulatory filings reviewed by The New York Times indicate that it is butane, a highly flammable gas, stored under pressure. The company’s filing described the risks of explosion, citing a “worst case scenario” that could cause second-degree burns a half-mile away, and said that to mitigate the risk the plant was equipped with sprinklers, gas detectors and alarms.

Chasing the ‘circular economy’

It isn’t unusual, of course, for any new technology or facility to experience hiccups. The plastics industry says these projects, once they get going, will bring the world closer to a “circular” economy, where things are reused again and again.

Plastics-industry lobbying groups are promoting chemical recycling. At a hearing in New York late last year, industry lobbyists pointed to the promise of advanced recycling in opposing a packaging-reduction bill that would eventually mandate a 50 percent reduction in plastic packaging. And at negotiations for a global plastics treaty , lobby groups are urging nations to consider expanding chemical recycling instead of taking steps like restricting plastic production or banning plastic bags.

A spokeswoman for the American Chemistry Council, which represents plastics makers as well as oil and gas companies that produce the building blocks of plastic, said that chemical recycling potentially “complements mechanical recycling, taking the harder-to-recycle plastics that mechanical often cannot.”

Environmental groups say the companies are using a timeworn strategy of promoting recycling as a way to justify selling more plastic, even though the new recycling technology isn’t ready for prime time. Meanwhile, they say, plastic waste chokes rivers and streams, piles up in landfills or is exported .

“These large consumer brand companies, they’re out over their skis,” said Judith Enck, the president of Beyond Plastics and a former regional E.P.A. administrator. “Look behind the curtain, and these facilities aren’t operating at scale, and they aren’t environmentally sustainable,” she said.

The better solution, she said, would be, “We need to make less plastic.”

Touring the plant

Mr. Olson recently strolled through a cavernous warehouse at PureCycle’s Ironton site, built at a former Dow Chemical plant. Since January, he said, PureCycle has been processing mainly consumer plastic waste and has produced about 1.3 million pounds of recycled polypropylene, or about 1 percent of its annual production target.

“This is a bag that would hold dog food,” he said, pointing to a bale of woven plastic bags. “And these are fruit carts that you’d see in street markets. We can recycle all of that, which is pretty cool.”

The plant was dealing with a faulty valve discovered the day before, so no pellets were rolling off the line. Mr. Olson pulled out a cellphone to show a photo of a valve with a dark line ringing its interior. “It’s not supposed to look like that,” he said.

The company later sent video of Mr. Olson next to white pellets once again streaming out of its production line.

PureCycle says every kilogram of polypropylene it recycles emits about 1.54 kilograms of planet-warming carbon dioxide. That’s on par with a commonly used industry measure of emissions for virgin polypropylene. PureCycle said that it was improving on that measure.

Nestlé, L’Oréal and Procter & Gamble continue to say they’re optimistic about the technology. In November, Nestlé said it had invested in a British company that would more easily separate out polypropylene from other plastic waste.

It was “just one of the many steps we are taking on our journey to ensure our packaging doesn’t end up as waste,” the company said.

Hiroko Tabuchi covers the intersection of business and climate for The Times. She has been a journalist for more than 20 years in Tokyo and New York. More about Hiroko Tabuchi

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Regions & Countries

1. views on future climate impacts, environmental harms.

Americans are far more likely to say the effects of climate change will make their local community a worse rather than better place to live over the next 30 years, but many also say they don’t expect much change in local conditions. These attitudes vary considerably by factors like age, partisan affiliation and region.

Differences by party

A majority of Democrats and Democratic leaners (59%) say they expect climate change to make conditions in their local community worse over the next 30 years. Far fewer (28%) say climate change won’t make much difference in their area and just 10% think climate impacts will improve their local conditions.

In contrast, a majority of Republicans and Republican leaners (55%) say they expect climate change to not make much difference on their community in the next 30 years. Another 22% say they expect living conditions in their local community to get worse over the next 30 years, while 5% say that living conditions will get better. Nearly two-in-ten Republicans (18%) do not believe climate change is impacting communities.

Views vary by age group

Younger adults are more likely than older adults to expect adverse impacts from climate change in their communities. Overall, 56% of young adults ages 18 to 29 say their local community will be a worse place to live because of climate change in the next 30 years, while only 9% say climate change will make their local community a better place to live. Roughly three-in-ten young adults do not think climate change will have much of an effect on conditions in their area.

By comparison, the most commonly held view among adults ages 65 and older is that climate change will not have much effect on conditions in their area (52%) over the next 30 years. About a third (32%) think climate change will make their community a worse place to live in the coming decades. 

Age differences among Republicans and Democrats

Age differences are seen within both the Republican and Democratic parties when it comes to expectations about local climate impacts.

Republicans ages 18 to 29 (37%) are more likely than Republicans ages 65 and older (14%) to expect climate change to make their local communities worse. Two-thirds of older Republicans say climate change will not make much difference on conditions in their local communities, compared with 45% of younger Republicans.

The age gap is more modest within the Democratic Party. Still, the youngest Democrats are 10 points more likely than the oldest Democrats to expect their area to become a worse place to live because of climate change over the next 30 years (65% vs. 55%).

Regional differences

Across the four major U.S. regions, Westerners are most likely to expect climate change to make local conditions in their area worse, while Midwesterners are least likely to say this.

About half of adults living in the West say climate change will make their community a worse place to live. By comparison, 30% of residents in the Midwest say the same.

Americans living in the South and Northeast fall in between, with roughly four-in-ten in both regions expecting climate change to make local conditions worse over the next 30 years.

This pattern of regional differences is seen among both Republicans and Democrats, though partisans remain far apart in their expectations within each region.

For example, in the West, 71% of Democrats and 28% of Republicans expect conditions in their community to worsen over the next 30 years. By comparison, in the Midwest, relatively smaller shares of both groups expect climate change to make their community a worse place to live, though Democrats remain much more likely than Republicans to say this (47% vs. 15%).

Expectations for future environmental problems, tech advances

Asked to think more broadly about future environmental conditions, Americans see a range of negative impacts as likely to come to pass.

About three-quarters of Americans say a growing number of plant and animal species will definitely or probably become extinct over the next 30 years.

Majorities also see other environmental harms as likely to happen:

• 61% say heatwaves will definitely or probably cause large numbers of people in the U.S. to die every year.
• 58% think rising sea levels will force large numbers of people to move away from coastal areas over the next 30 years.
• 54% expect widespread drought in the Western U.S. states will cause most rivers to dry up.

These questions did not directly ask about the role of climate change on these environmental harms. However, Americans who see climate change as a serious problem are much more likely than those who see it as a less serious problem to say each of these environmental harms will probably or definitely happen. For example, 85% of Americans who describe climate change as an extremely or very serious problem say heatwaves will definitely or probably cause large numbers of people to die over the next 30 years. Among those who see climate change as a not too serious problem or not a problem, just 16% say this. ( Read the Appendix for more details on this analysis .)

The survey also asked Americans about how technology and infrastructure may change in response to environmental conditions.

About two-thirds of Americans say most homes and buildings will definitely or probably need major upgrades to withstand extreme weather events over the next 30 years. A smaller majority (57%) expects that renewable sources will produce most of the country’s energy in 30 years. In 2022, renewable energy sources – such as wind, solar and hydropower – were used to generate about 22% of total electricity in the U.S.

Other forms of technology are currently less widespread, but could be further developed in future decades. Direct air capture is a technology that involves machines removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere , which the U.S. Department of Energy plans to build and use in coming years. Other technologies are in development that aim to cool oceans and influence weather through various approaches.

Sizable shares of Americans, but not majorities, expect these emerging technologies to become commonplace in the next 30 years:

• 45% of Americans say it is definitely or probably likely that countries will use technology to cool oceans and influence the weather.
• 42% say it is definitely or probably likely that machines will take large amounts of carbon dioxide out of the air and store it in the ground.

Partisans differ in expectations for future environmental conditions

Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to expect both worsening environmental harms and changes in technology and infrastructure over the next 30 years.

Roughly eight-in-ten Democrats say heatwaves will definitely or probably cause large numbers of people to die in the U.S. each year and that rising sea levels will force large number of Americans to move away from the coast.

By contrast, fewer than half of Republicans expect these environmental harms to happen over the next three decades.

On infrastructure and technological changes, Democrats (82%) are more likely than Republicans (46%) to say homes and buildings will need major upgrades to withstand extreme weather events. And a majority of Democrats (70%) expect most energy in the U.S. to be produced by renewable sources in 30 years, compared with fewer than half of Republicans (42%) who expect this to happen.

Partisan gaps are smaller over the emerging technologies of carbon capture and ocean cooling, with neither group confident that these technologies will be in place. Still, Democrats are somewhat more likely than Republicans to think both large-scale carbon capture (50% vs. 34%, respectively) and geoengineering to cool oceans (51% vs. 38%) are likely in 30 years.

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Report Materials

Table of contents, how americans view electric vehicles, fast facts about international views of climate change as biden attends un cop26 conference, 67% of americans perceive a rise in extreme weather, but partisans differ over government efforts to address it, most u.s. latinos say global climate change and other environmental issues impact their local communities, on climate change, republicans are open to some policy approaches, even as they assign the issue low priority, most popular.

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

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What to know about the new EPA rule limiting 'forever chemicals' in tap water

Berly McCoy

Regina G. Barber

Rebecca Ramirez

Following a new EPA rule, public water systems will have five years to address instances where there is too much PFAS in tap water – three years to sample their systems and establish the existing levels of PFAS, and an additional two years to install water treatment technologies if their levels are too high. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images hide caption

Following a new EPA rule, public water systems will have five years to address instances where there is too much PFAS in tap water – three years to sample their systems and establish the existing levels of PFAS, and an additional two years to install water treatment technologies if their levels are too high.

Wednesday the Environmental Protection Agency announced new drinking water standards to limit people's exposure to some PFAS chemicals.

For decades, PFAS have been used to waterproof and stain-proof a variety of consumer products. These "forever chemicals" in a host of products — everything from raincoats and the Teflon of nonstick pans to makeup to furniture and firefighting foam. Because PFAS take a very long time to break down, they can accumulate in humans and the environment.

Shots - Health News

Epa puts limits on 'forever chemicals' in drinking water.

'Forever chemicals' could be in nearly half of U.S. tap water, a federal study finds

Now, a growing body of research is linking them to human health problems like serious illness, some cancers, lower fertility and liver damage.

Science correspondent Pien Huang joins the show today to talk through this new EPA rule — what the threshold for safe levels of PFAS in tap water is, why the rule is happening now and how the federal standards will be implemented.

Listen to Short Wave on Spotify , Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts .

Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave .

This episode was produced by Berly McCoy. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Scott Hensley. Rebecca, Berly and Pien Huang checked the facts.

• forever chemicals
• drinking water
• Environmental Protection Agency

EPA imposes first national limits on 'forever chemicals' in drinking water

For the first time, the Environmental Protection Agency has established national limits for six types of perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances in drinking water.

The substances, known by the initialism PFAS, are nicknamed "forever chemicals" because they barely degrade and are nearly impossible to destroy , so they can linger permanently in air, water and soil.

As a class of chemicals, PFAS have been associated with a higher risk of certain cancers, heart disease, high cholesterol, thyroid disease , low birth weight and reproductive issues, including decreased fertility. 

Most people in the U.S. have PFAS in their blood , according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

The EPA announced Wednesday that levels of PFOA and PFOS — two types of PFAS commonly used in nonstick or stain-resistant products such as food packaging and firefighting foam — can’t exceed 4 parts per trillion in public drinking water. 

Three additional PFAS chemicals will be restricted to 10 parts per trillion. They are PFNA and PFHxS — older versions of PFAS — and GenX chemicals, a newer generation of chemicals created as a replacement for PFOA.

PFOA and PFOS are the most widely used and studied types of PFAS, according to the EPA. Companies started making them in the 1940s, but the substances were largely phased out of U.S. chemical and product manufacturing in the mid-2000s. However, they persist in the environment and have mostly been replaced by newer types of chemicals within the same class.

The EPA’s new limit reflects the lowest levels of PFOA and PFOS that laboratories can reasonably detect and public water systems can effectively treat. But, according to the agency, water systems should aim to eliminate the chemicals, because there is no safe level of exposure.

Eleven states already have regulatory standards for PFAS in drinking water. The EPA estimated that 6% to 10% of the country’s public water systems — 4,100 to 6,700 systems in total — will need to make changes to meet the new federal limits.

“One hundred million people will be healthier and safer because of this action,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said Tuesday on a media call, referring to the number of people served by the water systems that will need upgrades.

As of Wednesday, public water systems that don’t monitor for PFAS have three years to start. If they detect PFAS at levels above the EPA limits, they will have two more years to purchase and install new technologies to reduce PFAS in their drinking water.

The EPA estimates that the new limits will prevent thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of serious illnesses.

One of the biggest health concerns associated with PFOA is an increased risk of kidney cancer . Exposure to high levels of PFOS has also been associated with an increased risk of liver cancer .

GenX chemicals have been shown in animal studies to damage the liver, kidneys and immune system, as well as liver and pancreatic tumors. According to studies in rodents, PFNA exposure could lead to developmental issues and PFHxS may disrupt the thyroid system. 

The EPA also set a limit Wednesday for mixtures of at least two of the following chemicals: PFNA, PFHxS, PFBS and GenX. Public water systems can use an equation provided by the EPA to determine whether the cumulative concentrations of the chemicals exceed the agency’s threshold. 

The EPA proposed limits to PFAS in drinking water last year. After it reviewed public comments, it made the limits official Wednesday.

“This is a huge, historic public health win,” said Scott Faber, senior vice president of government affairs for the Environmental Working Group, an activist group that advocates for stricter regulations of drinking water pollutants.

Faber called the new EPA limits “the most important step we’ve taken to improve the safety of our tap water in a generation” and “the single most important step we’ve taken to address PFAS ever.”

Jamie DeWitt, director of the Environmental Health Sciences Center at Oregon State University, said that although the new limits don’t end the problem of PFAS in drinking water, they represent significant progress.

“This is going to give people in contaminated communities at least a sense that the federal government cares about them and cares about their exposure, because I think many people living in PFAS-impacted communities have not felt heard,” she said. 

The EPA said Wednesday that $1 billion in funding is newly available to help states and territories implement PFAS testing and treatment at public water systems and to help owners of private wells do the same. The funding comes from the federal infrastructure law passed in 2021, which set aside $9 billion to address PFAS and other contaminants in water. The money will be distributed as grants.  

Some public water systems have also sued companies that manufacture or previously manufactured PFAS, aiming to hold them accountable for the costs of testing and filtering for PFAS. One such lawsuit resulted in a $1.18 billion settlement last year for 300 drinking water providers nationwide. Another lawsuit awarded $10.5 billion to $12.5 billion , depending on the level of contamination found, to public water systems across the country through 2036.

The most common way to remove PFAS from water is through an activated carbon filter, which traps the chemicals as water passes through. Other options include reverse osmosis or ion exchange resins, which act like tiny magnets that attract PFAS chemicals. 

But even once water is treated for PFAS, it can take a while to see positive impacts, said Anna Reade, director of PFAS advocacy at the National Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group. 

“For most of these six chemicals, it’s between two to eight years for the amount in our bodies to decrease by half. So we’re looking at years before we see some substantial decreases in our exposure over time,” she said.

The EPA’s new drinking water limits apply to only a small fraction of the more than 12,000 types of PFAS , so activists are still concerned about overall exposure.

“This is not the final step,” Reade said. “We still have a lot of other PFAS to worry about.”

Aria Bendix is the breaking health reporter for NBC News Digital.

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Environmental measurement study of double-aging neighborhoods under the epa-s model in china provisionally accepted.

• 1 Tianjin University, China
• 2 Tsinghua University, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

The "double aging" problem of the aging population and the simultaneous aging of the community's physical environment will become a huge challenge in highly urbanized areas of the world, and China's performance is becoming more and more obvious, affecting the physical and mental health and quality of life of the elderly. Nowadays, the paradigm of solving the double aging problem with the concept of "active aging" is gaining international acceptance, which means the elderly are centered on the design and construction of a community environment that maintains their ability to live independently and promotes active social interaction in urban regeneration. However, existing research still has shortcomings in how to apply the perspective of active aging to establish an indicator system for evaluating the built environment of "double aging" neighborhoods and formulate action strategies. The study constructs a theoretical analysis framework of EPA-S (E-Environment supports, P-Personal abilities, A-Activity behaviors, S-State of healthy and active life) from the perspective of active aging and builds the model based on that. This observational study designed the survey content and collected sample data in four typical double-aging neighborhoods in Beijing for multi-layer linear regression analysis to verify the reliability of the model and the correlation between indicators. It found that the design of the "EPA-S" model has a certain degree of credibility. In addition to personal socioeconomic factors, active living abilities, and material environmental support also have a significant impact on the mental health and happiness of the elderly. Specifically, being more involved in community public affairs and collective cultural and recreational activities, and better improving the quality of public activity venues and service facilities within walking distance of the elderly are related to the elderly maintaining good physical and mental health. The "EPA-S" model established in this study can be used as a reference tool to evaluate the active aging level of "double-aging" neighborhoods. At the same time, the analysis results of each variable also provide important inspiration for formulating specific neighborhoods’ regeneration strategies.

Keywords: Double aging, Active aging, older neighborhoods, urban regeneration, China

Received: 06 Nov 2023; Accepted: 12 Apr 2024.

Copyright: © 2024 Chen, Gan and Bian. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Mx. Lanchun Bian, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, Beijing, China

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