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...

Hannah Zoller, Steven J. Lade, C. Kendra Gotangco Gonzales, Ingo Fetzer, Nitin Chaudhary, Juan C. Rocha. 2025. Supplementary material to "A global map of Earth system interactions". https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-3341

The intricate interplay of the biophysical processes of the Earth system provides the basis for Earth resilience and human well-being. With local anthropogenic pressures increasing in most regions, there has been a growing need for a systemic understanding of this interplay on a sub-global scale. However, due to inconsistency in the temporal and spatial scales in the corresponding studies, a holistic assessment of the environm...

Hannah Zoller, Steven J. Lade, C. Kendra Gotangco Gonzales, Ingo Fetzer, Nitin Chaudhary, Juan C. Rocha. 2025. A global map of Earth system interactions. EGUsphere. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-3341

The intricate interplay of the biophysical processes of the Earth system provides the basis for Earth resilience and human well-being. With local anthropogenic pressures increasing in most regions, there has been a growing need for a systemic understanding of this interplay on a sub-global scale. However, due to inconsistency in the temporal and spatial scales in the corresponding studies, a holistic assessment of the environm...

Xander Huggins, Tom Gleeson, James S Famiglietti, Robert Reinecke, Daniel Zamrsky, Thorsten Wagener, Richard G Taylor, Megan Konar, Claudia Ruz Vargas, Miina Porkka, Lan Wang-Erlandsson, Inge de Graaf, Mark Cuthbert, Sara Lindersson, Yoshihide Wada, Marc F P Bierkens, Yadu Pokhrel, Juan Rocha, Giuliano Di Baldassarre, Matti Kummu, Grant Ferguson, Abhijit Mukherjee, Min-Hui Lo, Bridget R Scanlon, Mark S Johnson, Chunmiao Zheng. 2025. A review of open data for studying global groundwater in social–ecological systems. Environmental Research Letters. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/adf127

Global data have served an integral role in characterizing large-scale groundwater systems, identifying their sustainability challenges, and informing on socioeconomic and ecological dimensions of groundwater. These insights have revealed groundwater as a dynamic component of the water cycle and social–ecological systems, leading to an expansion in groundwater science that increasingly focuses on groundwater’s interactions wit...

Nielja Knecht, Romi Amilia Lotcheris, Ingo Fetzer, Juan Rocha. 2025. Complex Realities, Simple Signals? Global Evaluation of Early Warning Signals for Forest Mortality Events. EGUsphere. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-4902

Forests around the world are increasingly experiencing large-scale regional mortality events as a result of droughts and heat waves. Despite their considerable impacts on the material, non-material, and regulatory contributions of forest ecosystems to people, these mortality events remain difficult to predict. Temporal Early Warning Signals (EWS) based on the concept of Critical Slowing Down (CSD) have been applied widely to r...

Rachel Mazac, Hanna Karlsson Potter, U. Martin Persson, Rasmus Einarsson, Hanna Rut Carlsson, Janne Bengtsson, Johan Karlsson, Garry Peterson, Line J. Gordon, Elin Röös. 2025. Diet changes in food futures improve Swedish environmental and health outcomes. Communications Earth & Environment. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-02679-2

Aligning national food systems with global goals is required for sustainable transitions. We examine if realistic, context-specific dietary changes, mindful of Swedish food culture and in line with future scenarios, are sufficient to meet ambitious environmental goals. Here, we quantified diets based on the four Swedish Food Futures scenarios, which reflect prospects of technological development, behavioral change, import tren...

Violeta Cabello, Alejandro Merlo, María Mancilla, Jesús M. Siqueiros, Xabier E. Barandiaran. 2025. Autonomy and Its Limits in Social-Ecological Systems. Outonomy: Fleshing out the Concept of Autonomy Beyond the Individual. Pages 121–130. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-05501-9_12

Traditionally, autonomy has been perceived through the lens of individualism and internalism, a view increasingly challenged by contemporary philosophical approaches, as well as by the context of global sustainability. Environmental challenges underline the need to shift from Earth-imposed limits to social-ecological limitations to achieve autonomy, democracy, and sustainability. In the realm of sustainability sciences, the co...

Torres, A., Jouffray, J.-B., Van Lancker, V., Velpen, A.V., Liu, J.. 2025. Reducing sand mining's growing toll on marine biodiversity. One Earth. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2025.101202

Pereira, K., Wabnitz, C.C.C., Schildt, L., Kuiper, J.J., Schmitt, R.J.P., Barbour, F., Jouffray, J.-B.. 2025. Rethinking sand circularity through sufficiency. One Earth. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2025.101207