The question of how science can become a lever in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals permeates most recent sustainability research. Wide-ranging literature calling for a transformative approach has emerged in recent years. This ‘transformative turn’ is fueled by publications from fields such as sustainability science, social-ecological research, conservation science, sustainability transitions, or sustainability governance studies. However, there is a lack of a shared understanding specifically of what is meant for research to be transformative in this developing discourse around doing science differently to tackle sustainability problems. We aim to advance transformative research for sustainability. We define transformative research and outline six of its characteristics: (1) interventional nature and a theory of change focus; (2) collaborative modes of knowledge production, experimentation and learning; (3) systems thinking literacy and contextualization; (4) reflexivity, normative and inner dimensions; (5) local agency, decolonization, and reshaping power; (6) new quality criteria and rethinking impact. We highlight three tensions between transformative research and traditional paradigms of academic research: (1) process- and output-orientation; (2) accountability toward society and toward science; (3) methodologies rooted in scientific traditions and post-normal methodologies. We conclude with future directions on how academia could reconcile these tensions to support and promote transformative research.

Dominant ways of doing research are not enough to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The typical response of science to dealing with the current local and global sustainability crises is to produce and accumulate more knowledge. Transformative research seeks to couple knowledge production with co-creating change. This paper defines the transformative way of doing research to pro-actively support society's fight against pressing societal and environmental problems. We present six characteristics of transformative research. We reflect on the challenges related to implementing these characteristics in scientific practice and on how academia can play its part.

Sustainability transformation needs to be reflected in science, but what makes sustainability research transformative?

Evolutionary biology considers how organisms and populations change over multiple generations, and so is naturally focused on issues of sustainability through time. Yet, sustainability science rarely incorporates evolutionary thinking and most scientists and policy makers do not account for how evolutionary processes contribute to sustainability. Understanding the interplay between evolutionary processes and nature's contribution to people is key to sustaining life on Earth.

Evolution, the change in gene frequencies within populations, is a process of genetically based modification by descent, providing the raw material essential for adaptation to environmental change. Therefore, it is crucial that we understand evolutionary processes if we aim for a sustainable planet. We here contribute to this development by describing examples of contemporary, rapid evolutionary changes of concern for sustainability, specifically highlighting the global spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) and how the evolutionary toolbox allowed tracking the origins and evolution of SARS-CoV-2 in real time and predicting potential future outbreaks. We also consider how urban development accelerates evolutionary processes such as altered phenotypic and physiological changes and the spread of infectious and zoonotic diseases. We show the importance of evolutionary concepts and techniques for public-health decision making. Many examples of the potential of evolutionary insights contributing to crucial sustainability challenges exist, including infectious and zoonotic diseases, ecosystem and human health, and conservation of natural resources. We thus join recent calls advocating for a stronger collaboration between evolutionary biologists and the sustainability community, increasing interdisciplinarity and the awareness about the knowledge of evolutionary processes for decision making and policies.

Evolution is fundamental to sustaining life on Earth and should be incorporated in sustainability measures and policies.

Humans have the tendency to damage the natural environment in many ways. Deforestation and conversion of forests for residential, industrial development, and expansion of agricultural crops, as well as the burning of fossil fuels, are some activities that disrupt natural ecosystems and wildlife and contribute to climate change. As a result, the life cycles of pathogens and intermediate hosts (insects, rodents, mammals) as well as biodiversity are affected. Through these activities, humans meet wild animals that transmit pathogens, resulting in their infection by zoonoses and causing epidemics–pandemics, the effects of which have as their final recipient himself and his activities.

This article aims to highlight the two-way relationship between those human activities and the occurrence of epidemics–pandemics. We will try to elaborate this two-way relationship, through the overview of the current pandemic (origin of SARS-CoV-2, modes of transmission, clinical picture of the disease of COVID-19, influence of weather and air pollution on prevalence and mortality, pandemic effects, and treatments). They are used as primary sources, scientific articles, literature, websites, and databases (Supplementary appendix) to analyze factors involved in the occurrence and transmission of zoonotic diseases in humans (Ebola, influenza, Lyme disease, dengue fever, cholera, AIDS/HIV, SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV). The present paper concluded that humanity today faces two major challenges: controlling the COVID-19 pandemic and minimizing the risk of a new global health crisis occurring in the future. The first can be achieved through equitable access to vaccines and treatments for all people. The second needs the global community to make a great change and start protecting the natural environment and its ecosystems through the adoption of prevention policies.

Two-way relationship between human activities and epidemics highlighted, through review of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2015, the United Nations articulated the ambition to move toward a prosperous, socially inclusive, and environmentally sustainable future for all by adopting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, little is known about the pathways that could lead to their concurrent achievement. We provide an overview of the current literature on quantitative pathways toward the SDGs, indicate the commonly used methods and indicators, and identify the most comprehensive pathways that have been published to date. Our results indicate that there is a need for more scenarios toward the full set of SDGs, using a wider range of underlying narratives.

Quantitative goal-seeking scenario studies could help to explore the needed systems' transformations to implement the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development by identifying enabling conditions and accounting for the synergies and trade-offs between the SDGs. Given that the SDGs were adopted some time ago, here, we review the existing global scenario literature to determine what it can offer in this context. We found only a few scenarios that address a large set of SDGs, while many more deal with specific clusters of 2–6 SDGs. We identified the most frequent clusters and compared the results of the most comprehensive sustainable development scenarios. The latter is complicated because of the diversity of methods, indicators, and assumptions used. Therefore, we suggest that an effort is needed to develop a wider set of scenarios that would achieve multiple SDGs, using a more standardized framework of targets and indicators.

This study reviews the current global pathways toward the SDGs and shows the need for a broader set of SDG scenarios.

Accelerated decarbonization of academic conferences is necessary and urgent. Despite the window of opportunity that COVID-19 created for rethinking conferences, there is a risk of slipping back into old habits now that restrictions are lifted. This commentary reports on recent experiences with a unique, sustainable approach to academic conferencing involving an international partnership and hub model across three continents. There is a need to continue to experiment with and implement new modes of sustainable academic conferencing.

In response to increasing demands to move away from carbon-intensive academic conferences, and a need to address social justice issues, the author-team designed, implemented, and experimented with a new conference model. Three key-design choices informed the model. First, instead of the common single-host-single-location approach, we established a partnership between three universities across three continents. Second, we adopted a hub model of three online conference days, followed by three non-hybrid, in-person only conference days. Third, we sought to accommodate global participation by organizing each of the online conference days during daylight hours in the respective time zones. We find that the model promotes less air travel and improved global south participation. Our approach adds to a growing number of experiments with new modes of academic conferencing in a world that is facing climate and inequality crises.

Decarbonizing academic conferences is necessary and urgent. This commentary reveals experiences with a hub-based format.

Despite growing recognition of the importance of transdisciplinary research in addressing complex sustainability challenges, in practice it has been much hampered by persistent inequities, power disparities, and epistemological disconnect. Planetary health as an emerging field offers a unique lens highlighting the need for knowledge integration across the environment, health, and development (EHD) nexus. Drawing upon extensive analyses, including a meta-analysis of existing transdisciplinary frameworks, a literature review of practices in these fields, and a case study of a planetary health action research project in Indonesia and Fiji, we propose a framework to guide the design and implementation of transdisciplinary research.

The proposed framework was iteratively designed, starting with existing frameworks, complemented by findings and practice recommendations from a literature review of 36 publications of recent transdisciplinary practices in the EHD fields and an in-depth case study of a planetary health research from Indonesian perspectives. The practice framework focuses on the stakeholder collaboration process, and emphasizes reflexivity and co-learning throughout all research phases: initiation (co-design); implementation (adaptive co-management), and monitoring and refinement (co-monitoring). Foundational considerations for stakeholder engagement could inform process design by reflecting on stakeholder contributions, interactions, integration, and expected outcomes. As suggested by development studies, and implicitly agreed upon but insufficiently elaborated within environment and health, attention to the local context of the research, mapping of power dynamics, and the values of equity and inclusivity are pertinent if research is to produce credible, relevant, and legitimate knowledge and outcomes. A renewed focus on addressing power equities can help ensure stakeholders' perspectives and interests are equally valued and potential solutions are not inadvertently excluded as a legacy of systemic power imbalance. The practice framework is most effectively applied in the initial process co-design, by process initiators and funders assessing proposals for international transdisciplinary research in power-diverse settings or resource-poor contexts.

How can researchers across diverse fields collaborate with renewed focus on power inequities to accelerate progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals?

Nations across the world are concerned with environmental issues like forest loss. The majority of nations acknowledge the importance of reducing forest loss, and make commitments to do so. However, researchers often find that despite these commitments, and the work of non-governmental organizations, in many nations, forest loss is not declining. This research argues that institutional capacity, specifically a nations domestic autonomy may help explain the ineffectiveness of environmental international non-governmental organizations (EINGOs) at reducing forest loss. Specifically, I argue that nations with stronger domestic autonomy, measured as the extent to which a nation is free of the direct control of external political actors, improves the effectiveness of EINGOs at reaching their goals of reducing forest loss due to an autonomous state's relative strength and ability to integrate their version of environmentalism or reinterpret existing norms of environmentalism into EINGO ideologies and activities.

Previous research finds that environmental international non-governmental organizations (EINGOs) tend to have differential impacts on environmental factors cross-nationally, such as forest loss. More recent work argues that decoupling between stated environmental norms and actual environmental outcomes may be the result of a lack of institutional capacity. Using ordinary least squares regression for 91 low- and middle-income nations from 2001 to 2014, I find that EINGOs reduce forest loss more in nations with higher rather than lower levels of domestic autonomy. However, I find that EINGOs and domestic autonomy on their own do not significantly predict forest loss.

This research argues that a nations domestic autonomy may help explain the ineffectiveness EINGOs at reducing forest loss.

Scientists often argue that today's efforts towards sustainability in cities call for a strong exchange on knowledge with non-scientific actors. But do urban practitioners think the same way? Do they see the need for scientific support in their work? In our research, we directly asked these questions to urban practitioners. This article evolves around their answers and describes the activities we conducted in order to start the necessary discussion with them.

Given the challenges cities are facing in their efforts towards sustainability, we scrutinize if urban practitioners believe that scientific knowledge can support them in implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and if, how. To find evidence, we conducted a ‘co-design’ approach in Future Earth in terms of knowledge production, targeting at German cities. In consequence, the aims of this article are twofold. First, we aim at describing the implementation of the co-design process itself as a potentially useful tool for the interaction with urban practitioners and the evaluation of their specific needs. Second, we present the main results of the co-design process and its contribution for SDG implementation in cities. Combining the two aims, we argue for novel research approaches that allow for more collaborative activities as well as for adequate funding opportunities in the light of urban sustainability transformations.

Co-design to support SDG implementation in cities towards sustainability transformations.

Human societies are changing where and how water flows through the atmosphere. However, these changes in the atmospheric water cycle are not being managed, nor is there any real sense of where these changes might be headed in the future. Thus, we develop a new economic theory of atmospheric water management, and explore this theory using creative story-based scenarios. These scenarios reveal surprising possibilities for the future of atmospheric water management, ranging from a stock market for transpiration to on-demand weather. We discuss these story-based futures in the context of research and policy priorities in the present day.

Humanity is modifying the atmospheric water cycle, via land use, climate change, air pollution, and weather modification. Historically, atmospheric water was implicitly considered a ‘public good’ since it was neither actively consumed nor controlled. However, given anthropogenic changes, atmospheric water can become a ‘common-pool’ good (consumable) or a ‘club’ good (controllable). Moreover, advancements in weather modification presage water becoming a ‘private’ good, meaning both consumable and controllable. Given the implications, we designed a theoretical framing of atmospheric water as an economic good and used a combination of methods in order to explore possible future scenarios based on human modifications of the atmospheric water cycle. First, a systematic literature search of scholarly abstracts was used in a computational text analysis. Second, the output of the text analysis was matched to different parts of an existing economic goods framework. Then, a group of global water experts were trained and developed story-based scenarios. The resultant scenarios serve as creative investigations of the future of human modification of the atmospheric water cycle. We discuss how the scenarios can enhance anticipatory capacity in the context of both future research frontiers and potential policy pathways including transboundary governance, finance, and resource management.

Story-based scenarios reveal novel future pathways for the management of the atmospheric water cycle.

A substantial increase in wind energy deployment worldwide is required to help achieve international targets for decreasing global carbon emissions and limiting the impacts of climate change. In response to global concerns regarding the environmental effects of wind energy, the International Energy Agency Wind Technical Collaborative Program initiated Task 34 – Working Together to Resolve Environmental Effects of Wind Energy or WREN. As part of WREN, this study performed an international assessment with the global wind energy and environmental community to determine priority environmental issues over the next 5‒10 years and help support collaborative interactions among researchers, developers, regulators, and stakeholders.

A systematic assessment was performed using feedback from the international community to identify priority environmental issues for land-based and offshore wind energy development. Given the global nature of wind energy development, feedback was of interest from all countries where such development is underway or planned to help meet United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change targets. The assessment prioritized environmental issues over the next 5–10 years associated with wind energy development and received a total of 294 responses from 28 countries. For land-based wind, the highest-ranked issues included turbine collision risk for volant species (birds and bats), cumulative effects on species and ecosystems, and indirect effects such as avoidance and displacement. For offshore wind, the highest-ranked issues included cumulative effects, turbine collision risk, underwater noise (e.g. marine mammals and fish), and displacement. Emerging considerations for these priorities include potential application to future technologies (e.g. larger turbines and floating turbines), new stressors and species in frontier regions, and cumulative effects for multiple projects at a regional scale. For both land-based and offshore wind, effectiveness of minimization measures (e.g. detection and deterrence technologies) and costs for monitoring, minimization, and mitigation were identified as overarching challenges.

Turbine collisions and cumulative effects among the international environmental priorities for wind energy development.

Almost 6 years have passed since the Colombian peace agreement was signed. However, the promise of a ‘Stable and lasting peace’ is slipping away as the transition towards peace is increasingly tainted and overshadowed with violence. The future of Colombia is at a crossroad and without international support and action taken to monitor global supply chains, these particular drivers of conflict, violence and environmental degradation will persist. We summarize the current situation and shed light on the complexities of building peace in Colombia, with a particular focus on the environmental changes that took place since the peace agreement was signed.

The Colombian peace agreement officially ended one of the world's longest internal armed conflicts. But the transformation of land use that takes place in the wake of the peace agreement has made the historic inequalities of access to land more visible and revealed inherent and violent struggles over resources that persist across the country. In this briefing we analyse the current status of peacebuilding in Colombia and highlight the major barriers and challenges in the current peacebuilding efforts. We show how the last few years brought severe and negative repercussions for people, communities and the natural environment in Colombia as cattle ranching, ‘productive agriculture’ and extractive industries are increasingly encroaching into indigenous territories, protected areas and forest ecosystems, replacing diverse natural forests that support biodiversity and contribute to human well-being locally and globally. The resurging presence of numerous armed groups seeking to control the profitable drug trade and mineral deposits are a major problem and obstacle for building lasting and sustainable peace among people and with the natural environment in Colombia. We conclude this briefing with points that we see as crucial to support the implementation of the peace agreement.

Colombia's peacebuilding effort must foster environmental stewardship and respect its biological and cultural diversity.

Small and medium enterprises generate an elevated environmental footprint, which requires green transformation to achieve sustainable development. The purpose of this study is to describe the intervention process in 120 microenterprises with the aim of improving environmental and sustainability performance in four categories: sustainability, water, energy and solid waste management to determine the importance to promote the sustainability process in this sector as a key factor to contribute to the inclusion and sustainable development.

Global small and medium enterprises (SMEs) represent 90% of global business, creating and maintaining 50% of employment, and in emerging economies, formal SMEs provide 40% of the national gross domestic product and the gap of productivity is approximately 7% of global gross domestic product with respect to large firms. This study analyses the strategies and possibilities to improve sustainability in 120 microenterprises. The project included five stages: the postulation, selection and enrolment; sustainability diagnosis; action plan formulation; the results of implementation and evaluation and the feedback on results. This study demonstrated the importance of integrating sustainability into the business to improve productivity, competitiveness and access to new markets; in many cases, the microentrepreneur is unaware of all possibilities offered by having environmentally friendly processes, which was shown with evidence throughout the study. Approximately 242 action plans were implemented, achieving multiple results that involved knowledge of processes and equipment of microenterprises to measure and improve their environmental performance. The findings of this study demonstrated that microenterprises require adequate support and financial programmes that should be designed and implemented by policymakers with the aim of strengthening this sector, decreasing poverty and promoting sustainable economic growth, environmentally friendly processes and development in developing countries.

Microenterprises have an important role in the economy and have the potential to achieve sustainability processes.

This article uses water to examine how the relationships of ethics to science are modified through the pursuit of Earth stewardship. Earth stewardship is often defined as the use of science to actively shape social–ecological relations by enhancing resilience. The changing relations of science to values are explored by considering how ideas of resilience operate to translate different ways of knowing water into the framework of Earth stewardship. This is not a neutral process, and Earth stewardship requires careful appraisal to ensure other ways of knowing water are not oppressed.

Scientific disclosures of anthropogenic impacts on the Earth system – the Anthropocene – increasingly come with ethical diagnoses for value transformation and, often, Earth stewardship. This article examines the changing relationship of science to values in calls for Earth stewardship with special attention to water resilience. The article begins by situating recent efforts to reconceptualize human–water relations in view of anthropogenic impacts on the global water system. It then traces some of the ways that Earth stewardship has been articulated, especially as a framework supporting the use of science to actively shape social–ecological relations by enhancing resilience. The shift in relations of ethics and science entailed by Earth stewardship is placed in historical context before the issues of water resilience are examined. Resilience, and critiques of it, are then discussed for how they operate to translate different ways of knowing water into the framework of Earth stewardship. The ethical stakes of such translations are a core concern of the conclusion. Rather than reducing different ways of knowing water to those amendable to the framework of Earth stewardship, the article advances a pluralized approach as needed to respect multiple practices for knowing and relating to water – and resilience.

Water resilience is key to Earth stewardship; Jeremy Schmidt examines how it changes relations of science and ethics.