Publications

Xuemei Bai, Giles B. Sioen, Şiir Kilkiş, Timon McPhearson, Zeenat Niazi, Jago Dodson, Tri Atmaja, Kensuke Fukushi, Niki Frantzeskaki, Harini Nagendra, Wanyu Shih, Thomas Elmqvist, Tischa Muñoz-Erickson, Xiangzheng Deng, Burak Güneralp, Shuaib Lwasa, Noboru Zama. 2025. Reimagining urban science for global sustainability: Five strategic research areas. Global Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2025.10025

Cities, as complex systems, are faced with increasingly diverse and connected challenges across social, economic, environmental, and health domains. To help cities address these challenges, the Future Earth Urban Knowledge-Action Network developed a cross-disciplinary urban research agenda through expert elicitations and extensive consultation. Five research themes to guide urban sustainability research were identified includi...

Sebastian Luckeneder. 2025. Spatial data approaches for assessing the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of mining activities. Doctoral thesis. Institute for Ecological Economics. WU Research.

The growing human population, economic expansion, urbanisation, and rising affluence have driven global resource consumption to unprecedented levels. Metals and minerals have experienced particularly rapid growth, and mining activities are projected to intensify due to higher demand in emerging economies, the global energy transition, and declining ore grades. While mining increasingly encroaches on vulnerable ecosystems, syst...

Piotr Krajewski, Marek Furmankiewicz, Marta Sylla, Iga Kołodyńska, Monika Lebiedzińska. 2025. Landscape Services from the Perspective of Experts and Their Use by the Local Community: A Comparative Study of Selected Landscape Types in a Region in Central Europe. Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.3390/su17156998

This study investigates the concept of landscape services (LS), which integrate environmental and sociocultural dimensions of sustainable development. Recognizing landscapes as essential to daily life and well-being, the research aims to support sustainable spatial planning by analyzing both their potential and their actual use. The study has three main objectives: (1) to assess the potential of 16 selected landscape types to ...

Andreas Plach, Lucie Bakels, Andreas Stohl. 2025. Reduction of residence time of air in the Arctic since the 1980s. ESS Open Archive. https://doi.org/10.22541/essoar.175318972.29624962/v1

The Arctic has seen dramatic changes in temperature, snow cover, and sea ice in recent decades. Here we use a simple metric, the Arctic residence time of air, that is, the time air spends uninterruptedly north of 70°N, to evaluate how these changes have affected the high-latitude atmospheric circulation in the last 40 years. We find that, on average, near-surface air resides between 7 (summer) and 12 (winter) days in the Arcti...

Mads Ejsing. 2025. New Materialism. Environmental Humanities Glossary. University of Copenhagen.

In the not-so-distant past, much of the humanities and social sciences treated the material world – the stuff of rocks, rivers, bones, and buildings – as passive scenery. Nature was the backdrop. Humans were the actors. We built, interpreted, imagined, and destroyed, while the world around us mostly reacted, inert and voiceless. But what if matter matters more than we thought? Emerging in the early 2000s, but drawing from a...

Danielle S Spence, Maureen G Reed, James P Robson, Bianca Currie, Eureta Rosenberg, Marlis Merry, Jana Gengelbach. 2025. Intercultural networks deepen learning for transformative sustainability education: lessons from co-designing transdisciplinary international learning labs. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2025.101567

In this paper, we emphasize the value of an intercultural network of researchers, students, and practitioners engaged in co-creating and delivering transdisciplinary sustainability learning opportunities. The network, the Trans disciplinary E ducation C ollaboration for T ransformations in S ustainability (TRANSECTS), is a north–south partnership with hub universities in Canada, Germany, and South Africa. Here, we in...

Fernando Racimo, Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, Rebecca Leigh Rutt, Mads Ejsing. 2025. Degrowth and decolonisation in academia. Degrowth Journal. https://doi.org/10.36399/Degrowth.003.01.09

Like other societal institutions, academia today faces an existential crisis. Rising inequality and authoritarianism, coupled with climate breakdown and collapsing ecosystems, are threatening the conditions under which academic knowledge is produced and shared. At the same time, academics are coming to terms with their institutions’ role in contributing to these processes, particularly in the Global North. Many are recognising...

Jim Leape, Bronwen Golder, Richard Barnes, Jean-Baptiste Jouffray, Dawn Borg-Costanzi, Jessica L Decker Sparks, Jaeyoon Park, Robert Blasiak, Elizabeth R Selig, Shinnosuke Nakayama, Colette C.C. Wabnitz. 2025. Leveraging port state measures to combat illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing. Science Advances. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.ads1592

Illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing threatens the sustainability of fisheries and communities dependent on them. The Port State Measures Agreement (PSMA) is a key tool for combatting IUU fishing by foreign fleets, requiring standardized inspections, information sharing, and port denial. Using satellite data, we characterized how PSMA has affected high seas vessel behavior and identify opportunities to strengthen...

Sebastian Luckeneder, Victor Maus, Juliana Siqueira-Gay, Tamás Krisztin, Michael Kuhn. 2025. Forest loss and uncertain economic gains from industrial and garimpo mining in Brazilian municipalities. Nature Communications. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-61930-8

Environmental and social risks in mining regions often juxtapose promises of local economic growth. Brazil, a major global mineral supplier and conservation leader, has pursued resource-led development despite mining’s threat to its forests. Yet, the efficacy of this development strategy is uncertain. In this study, we examine mining’s contribution to deforestation and regional economic growth in Brazil. For garimpo mining con...

Stefan Giljum, Victor Maus, Laura Sonter, Sebastian Luckeneder, Tim Werner, Stephan Lutter, Julia Gershenzon, Megan J. Cole, Juliana Siqueira-Gay, Anthony Bebbington. 2025. Metal mining is a global driver of environmental change. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-025-00683-w

Global metal extraction is increasing, owing to rising mineral demands from infrastructure development and the growing need for metal-intensive renewable energy technologies to mitigate climate change and phase out coal mining. However, extraction of metal ores also drives impacts on land use, water resources and biodiversity. In this Review, we evaluate mining trends of 47 metal ores between 1970 and 2022 and explore the envi...