This commentary argues that the current academic and societal pursuit of ‘solutions’ to sustainability challenges fails to acknowledge how change normally occurs in complex adaptive systems, that is, socio-economic systems and the Earth system, relevant for societal development. Such systems seldom evolve through isolated changes or ‘solutions’ but, rather, through numerous small adjustments of component parts. It is the interactions between these small adjustments that lead to system change. Thus, we argue the need for altered expectations in relation to, and a new narrative describing, the anticipated role of research in the pursuit of a more sustainable societal development trajectory.

The commentary argues for seeking multiple adjustments rather than seeking ‘solutions’ to our current planetary crises. Based on the belief that many of these adjustments may already lie dormant across academic departments, the University of Copenhagen conducted a series of ‘Transformation Labs’ in 2023 with the purpose of identifying the potential socio-economic and technical adjustments that, in combination, may catalyze societal transformation toward sustainability as well as potential barriers for their societal implementation. Here, we reflect on the learnings from the exercise and argue that both current funding practices and university training should be modified to support this altered narrative. In addition, interactions between research institutions and the beyond-academic world should be strengthened.

For reaching a sustainable trajectory, research needs to focus on multiple adjustments rather than fixed solutions.

Loss and damage is treated as comprising separate ‘economic’ and ‘non-economic’ dimensions in research and policy. While this has contributed to greater awareness and visibility of non-economic values, our empirical insights show that the two are inextricably linked and that research aimed at informing policy must be better attuned to the multifaceted and cascading nature of loss and damage.

In research and policy, climate-related loss and damage is commonly categorized as either ‘economic’ or ‘non-economic’. One clear benefit of this dichotomy is that it has raised people's awareness of the often under-discussed intangible loss and damage. However, empirical research shows that these two categories are inextricably linked. Indeed, ‘economic’ and ‘non-economic’ loss and damage often overlap, with items that are valued in monetary terms also having non-monetary significance. For example, the loss of a home due to flooding is not only a financial loss but can also have a profound impact on identity and well-being. Moreover, ‘economic’ loss and damage can cascade into ‘non-economic’ loss and damage, and vice versa. For example, when a household incurs economic losses due to drought, this may prevent their children from attending school, which has long-term financial consequences. We argue that rather than dichotomizing loss and damage, recognizing that it is multidimensional, interwoven, and evolving over time will open up new avenues for research that better reflect reality and can therefore better inform policies to address loss and damage.

This comment shows how economic and non-economic loss and damage are linked, which has important policy implications.

Healthcare systems significantly impact the environment, which in turn affects human health. To address this, we propose to revise a popular framework for healthcare improvement, by introducing the advancement of planetary health (the health of both humans and the natural systems) among the aims that health systems should pursue. This approach suggests reducing medical service needs through disease prevention, minimizing environmental impacts, and supporting global efforts to protect planetary health. Practical applications to bring about these pathways are documented in the literature.

Restoring the health of the planet, with concurrent benefits for human civilization, is paramount. Healthcare systems play a crucial role in this regard, considering the environmental impact of health services. Widely recognized approaches to designing healthcare systems for the optimization of their performance are based on the pursuit of multiple aims, such as the Triple Aim and Quadruple Aim frameworks. The objective of this work is to revise the latter by substituting ‘Advance Planetary Health’ for ‘Improve Population Health’.

The objective of advancing planetary health supports all other pre-existing objectives: lowering costs, enhancing patient experience, team wellbeing, and population health, which directly relates to planetary health. Health systems promoting planetary health reduce the need for medical services through disease prevention and health promotion, pursue the provision of appropriate care, minimize the overall environmental impact of medical services, and support planetary health initiatives across all sectors and society. Multiple interconnected pathways exist to operationalize the above components.

A revised quadruple aim for healthcare improvement, aligned with social and economic goals of sustainable prosperity and wellbeing, may be a desirable step toward constructing planetary health systems capable of maximizing the health of humans and natural systems.

It's time for new ‘planetary health systems’: focusing on planetary health to enhance healthcare performance. #PlanetaryHealth #ClimateCrisis #HealthcareImprovement.

There is a need to develop tools that facilitate knowledge sharing and cooperation among researchers, institutions, and countries around the world, especially concerning global, transboundary, and long-term climate impacts. The IPCC report aims to achieve this goal, and emphasizes that digitization of global maps, centralization of multidisciplinary results, and further sorting and simplification of data products are necessary to make the immense amount of information accessible to broader communities. To this end, we build a new digital atlas useful for training the future generation of climate scientists, for academic collaboration, and as a first stop in intergovernmental conversations.

Climate change is a significant threat to humanity, and its impacts on natural and human systems have already been observed. Climate action requires both global and local cooperation and needs to be approached together with other world crises in a transformative, systemic, and holistic way, prioritizing long-term human and ecological well-being and short-term targeted action. Bridging the gap between climate scientists, educators, and decision-makers is crucial, which requires a multidisciplinary approach, meaningful collaboration tools, practical simplification, and visualization of research output data, and more effective communication. To address some of these challenges in communication for decision-making, as well as challenges in multidisciplinary climate teaching and research, we built a new digital atlas called the Perry World House Global Climate Security Atlas. Researchers, teachers, and policymakers are encouraged to use the Atlas to visualize global information on physical climate projections, environmental, and ecological data, as well as information on human, social, and political systems. In this paper, we motivate the need for the Atlas and summarize its potential uses, provide a summary description of the datasets, and offer suggestions on how to bridge the gap between science and policymaking.

A new interactive Atlas that brings together global, transboundary, multidisciplinary, and long-term climate impacts.

Powerful influences on societal knowledge, values, and behavior, artificial intelligence-infused media systems, new and old, currently reinforce the interlinked problems of inequality and unsustainable consumption. This problem is rarely discussed in environmental research and policy, and even less so how it might be overcome. Discussing this consequential blind spot and the power structures that underpin it, this article argues that sustainability researchers should centrally explore the need and possibilities for democratic reconfiguration of the political economies and charters of media systems to achieve sustainability and other broad, inclusive public goals.

Powerful influences on societal knowledge, values and behavior, artificial intelligence-infused media systems, new and old, currently tend to reinforce the interlinked problems of inequality and unsustainable consumption. This problem is rarely discussed in environmental research and policy, and even less so how it might be overcome. Discussing this consequential blind spot and the power structures that underpin it, this article argues that sustainability researchers should centrally explore the possibilities for democratic governance and reconfiguration of the political economies of media systems to foster human wellbeing and just transformations toward sustainability.

Sustainability transformations require ‘signification steering’ and interventions in media systems' configurations.

Scenarios compatible with the Paris agreement's temperature goal of 1.5 °C involve carbon dioxide removal measures – measures that actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere – on a massive scale. Such large-scale implementations raise significant ethical problems. Van Vuuren et al. (2018), as well as the current IPCC scenarios, show that reduction in energy and or food demand could reduce the need for such activities. There is some reluctance to discuss such societal changes. However, we argue that policy measures enabling societal changes are not necessarily ethically problematic. Therefore, they should be discussed alongside techno-optimistic approaches in any kind of discussions about how to respond to climate change.

The 1.5 °C goal has given impetus to carbon dioxide removal (CDR) measures, such as bioenergy combined with carbon capture and storage, or afforestation. However, land-based CDR options compete with food production and biodiversity protection. Van Vuuren et al. (2018) looked at alternative pathways including lifestyle changes, low-population projections, or non-CO2 greenhouse gas mitigation, to reach the 1.5 °C temperature objective. Underlined by the recently published IPCC AR6 WGIII report, they show that demand-side management measures are likely to reduce the need for CDR. Yet, policy measures entailed in these scenarios could be associated with ethical problems themselves. In this paper, we therefore investigate ethical implications of four alternative pathways as proposed by Van Vuuren et al. (2018). We find that emission reduction options such as lifestyle changes and reducing population, which are typically perceived as ethically problematic, might be less so on further inspection. In contrast, options associated with less societal transformation and more techno-optimistic approaches turn out to be in need of further scrutiny. The vast majority of emission reduction options considered are not intrinsically ethically problematic; rather everything rests on the precise implementation. Explicitly addressing ethical considerations when developing, advancing, and using integrated assessment scenarios could reignite debates about previously overlooked topics and thereby support necessary societal discourse.

Policy measures enabling societal changes are not necessarily as ethically problematic as commonly presumed and reduce the need for large-scale CDR.

There is a global water crisis, brought on by human actions. The ways we make decisions about water must transform to solve it. We focused on the attitudes that people in society hold toward water to understand how close or far away we are from a broadly accepted worldview that supports this transformation (what we call ‘water resilience’). We found that, across six countries in the Global South and North, attitudes showed moderate support for water resilience. Many people also showed potential to increase their support.

Water in the Anthropocene is threatened. Water governance aligned with the complex, dynamic, and uncertain nature of social–ecological systems (a ‘water resilience’ paradigm) is needed, and requires transformative change. We queried the potential for transformative change from the perspective that societal worldviews/paradigms offer an important leverage point for system change. Our study aimed to identify attitudes about water resilience and the extent to which there was potential for greater endorsement of water resilience. We surveyed individuals in six countries using vignettes to determine their level of water resilience endorsement (n = 2649). Overall water resilience endorsement was moderate (M = 2.86 out of 4). In some countries, a vignette related to a personally relevant water issue resulted in higher water resilience endorsement. More than half of the respondents held the potential for greater water resilience endorsement. Those with the greatest potential were younger, had children, considered religion more important, were more likely to live in urban areas, and lived in the same area for 10+ years. These findings provide guidance how to engage with the public (e.g. age-specific or parent-focused framing) to potentially increase societal water resilience endorsement.

General public in six countries moderately supports water resilience to address the water crisis, with room to improve.

Improving the flow of information between governments and local communities is paramount to achieving effective climate change mitigation and adaptation. We propose five pathways to deepen participation and improve community-based climate action. The pathways can be summarized as visualization, simulations to practice decision-making, participatory budgeting and planning, environmental civic service, and education and curriculum development. These pathways contribute to improving governance by consolidating in governments the practice of soliciting and incorporating community participation while simultaneously giving communities the tools and knowledge needed to become active contributors to climate change adaptation and mitigation measures.

Community participation is considered a key component in the design of responses to climate change. Substantial engagement of local communities is required to ensure information flow between governments and communities, but also because local communities are the primary sites of adaptation action. However, frontline communities are often excluded from decision-making and implementation processes due to political choices or failures to identify ways to make participatory frameworks more inclusive. Climate action requires the active engagement of communities in making consequential decisions, or what we term deepened participation. We propose five pathways to deepen participation: visualization, simulations to practice decision-making, participatory budgeting and planning, environmental civic service, and education and curriculum development. The five pathways identify strategies that can be incorporated into existing organizational and institutional frameworks or used to create new ones. Shortcomings related to each strategy are identified. Reflection by communities and governments is encouraged as they choose which participatory technique(s) to adopt.

Climate action requires the active engagement of communities. Learn five pathways to get started deepening participation.

Cities in the distant past – as documented by archaeologists and historians – provide an extensive record of urban successes and failures, yet this information has had little impact on the field of sustainability science. I explore two reasons for this situation. First, these scholars have often failed to synthesize their data scientifically, and, second, they have not approached the transfer of past knowledge to present research in a rigorous manner. I organize discussion of these issues around three arguments for the present value of past cities: the urban trajectory argument, the sample size argument, and the laboratory argument.

I explore the different ways historical and archaeological data can be deployed to contribute to research on urban sustainability science, emphasizing issues of argumentation and epistemology. I organize the discussion around three types of argument. The urban trajectory argument exploits the long time series of early cities and urban regions to examine change at a long time scale. The sample size argument views the role of early cities as adding to the known sample of settlements to increase understanding of urban similarities and differences. The laboratory argument uses data from past cities to explicitly test models derived from contemporary cities. Each argument is examined for three contrasting epistemological approaches: heuristic analogs, case studies, and quantitative studies. These approaches form a continuum leading from lesser to greater scientific rigor and from qualitative to quantitative frameworks. Much past-to-present argumentation requires inductive logic, also called reasoning by analogy. Sustainability scientists have confused this general form of argument with its weakest version, known as heuristic analogs. I stress ways to improve methods of argumentation, particularly by moving research along the continuum from weaker to stronger arguments.

Better methods of argument allow the past record of urban success and failure to contribute to urban sustainability science.

Endorphins have been associated with analgesia and pleasurable activities. However, the so-called “happy chemicals” are far more complex than initially thought. Research shows that their impact on human behavior is modulatory, with the main goal not being “happiness” but a “return to the most desirable state” – which can be highly context-dependent.

Review of the modulatory functions of endorphins on human behavior and their possible implications in psychiatric conditions.

Pubmed search consisting of the MeSH terms “Endorphins”, “Opioid Peptides”, “Behavior”, and “Psychiatry”.

Endorphins elicit pleasure via stimulation of the release of dopamine from the ventral tegmental area to the nucleus accumbens. They are known to be involved in analgesia and stress response and social interaction. Endorphins can be released in a multitude of circumstances that may seem contradictory – having both inhibitory and stimulating roles in appetite, sexual response, and memory– but are modulatory effects depending on what constitutes homeostasis in each context. Peripheral levels of endorphins have been found low in depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. In schizophrenia, studies suggest that peripheral levels are high during psychosis, low in chronic disease and that naltrexone seems to improve auditory hallucinations. Endorphins may also have a role as markers of treatment response.

Endorphins have a complex role in behavior and homeostasis. These molecules could have implications in psychiatry- given that they are part of our stress response and are released to promote a more “desirable state”. Their role as a marker of illness or response to treatment needs further investigation.

No significant relationships.

Extremely high rates of suicide localized within subgroups of populations where suicide is rare have been reported. We investigated this intriguing observation in a population of South-East Asia, where local culture should theoretically be preventative of suicide.

A team including an anthropologist and a psychiatrist surveyed all cases of suicide that had occurred over 10 years in four isolated regions. A psychological autopsy was carried out comparing each suicide case with two matched control cases.

In a region of 1192 inhabitants, 16 suicides occurred, leading to an annual suicide rate of 134/1 000 00 which is 10 times the rate in the USA or Canada. By contrast, three ethnically similar distant communities showed low to null rates. The gender ratio was three males to one female and two-thirds of cases were aged below 35 years. Methods of suicide were poisoning and hanging and motives mainly included interpersonal discord. The pattern of developmental and clinical risk factors was somewhat different from Western countries, showing no childhood maltreatment, only one case of alcohol/substance abuse and impulsive–aggressive personality but elevated rates of social anxiety. Suicide cases had very high frequencies of second-degree biological relatives who committed suicide.

Our study confirms a persistent phenomenon of high suicide rates restricted to a subgroup of a pre-industrialized population. We hypothesized this might be explained by isolation and endogamy, which may have promoted the selection/amplification of genetic vulnerability factors, or a contagion effect. These findings shed light on suicide from both a singular and a universal perspective, suggesting that particular local conditions may significantly modulate the rate of this complex behavior.