Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability

Publications

• NATURE SUSTAINABILITY - City–company collaboration towards aligned science-based target setting

  Published on December 4, 2024
  Focusing on the top 200 cities and 500 companies by greenhouse gas emissions, we analyse the current state and potential of adopting science-based targets for climate.

• JOURNAL OF CLEANER PRODUCTION - Unveiling complementarities between mangrove restoration and global sustainable development goals

  Published on October 5, 2024
  This investigation follows the ‘product space’ method in economics and creates the ‘Mangrove-SDG space’ to assess each metric pair’s cooccurrence and comparative advantages with validated stability.

• NATURE COMMUNICATIONS - Mixed effectiveness of global protected areas in resisting habitat loss

  Published on September 27, 2024
  we analyze the performance of over 160,000 protected areas in resisting habitat loss at different spatial and temporal scales, using high-resolution data.

• THE LANCET PLANETARY HEALTH COMMISSION - A just world on a safe planet: a Lancet Planetary Health–Earth Commission report on Earth-system boundaries, translations, and transformations

  Published on September 11, 2024
  We quantify safe and just Earth-system boundaries (ESBs) and assess minimum access to natural resources required for human dignity and to enable escape from poverty.

• NATURE GEOSCIENCE - Substantial increase in China’s manufactured sand supply since 2010

  Published on July 19, 2024
  We present a material flow analysis of sand from 1995 to 2020 that shows China’s overall sand supply surged by approximately 400% over the study period.

• HELIYON - Heterogeneous and interactive effects of payments for ecosystem services on household income across giant panda nature reserves

  Published on July 19, 2024
  This study used linear regression and geographic detector analysis to evaluate the effects of the NFCP and GTGP on household income and the factors which moderate these effects.

• THE INNOVATION GEOSCIENCE - Innovations in science, technology, engineering, and policy (iSTEP) for addressing environmental issues towards sustainable development

  Published on July 17, 2024
  The evolution of sustainability science reviewed. iSTEP is addressing key environmental issues towards sustainable development outlined. Future perspectives on iSTEP for promoting sustainable development are proposed.

• NATURE ECOLOGY & EVOLUTION - Gaps and opportunities in modelling human influence on species distributions in the Anthropocene

  Published on June 12, 2024
  We show considerable gaps in including human predictors to understand current and future species distributions in the Anthropocene, opening opportunities for new inquiries

• BIOLOGICAL CONSERVATION - Field experiment reveals complex warming impacts on giant pandas' bamboo diet

  Published on June 1, 2024
  We conducted the first field experiment in giant panda habitats to assess the impacts of warmer temperatures on the population dynamics and dietary quality of arrow bamboo, a main food source of giant pandas.

• AMBIO - Mammal recovery inside and outside terrestrial protected areas

  Published on April 10, 2024
  We conducted an analysis of 2706 mammal populations both inside and outside of protected areas worldwide to better understand how protected areas contribute to mammalian recovery.

• CONSERVATION BIOLOGY - Mining threats in high-level biodiversity conservation policies

  Published on April 4, 2024
  We investigated how high-level national and international biodiversity conservation policies address mining threats, with a special focus on construction minerals.

• SCIENCE OF THE TOTAL ENVIRONMENT - Global hidden spillover effects among concurrent green initiatives

  Published on March 20, 2024
  We collected empirical data and information about green initiatives from 15 sites or countries worldwide, and explored how specific policy, intended behaviors, and gains of given green initiative may interact with those of other green initiatives.

• NATURE SUSTAINABILITY - Telecoupled impacts of the Russia–Ukraine war on global cropland expansion and biodiversity

  Published on March 1, 2024
  We simulated the global cropland expansion provoked by the reshaping of international virtual cropland flows under different war scenarios and conducted a biodiversity impact assessment.

• RESOURCES, CONSERVATION & RECYCLING - Workable solutions for sustainably feeding the Chinese population

  Published on March 1, 2024
  We calculated the environmental costs of producing domestic rice, wheat, corn, soybeans, and imported soybeans. The environmental costs were enormous, and the food self-sufficiency and sufficiency (imported soybean included) rates were below 100%.

• JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT - Pathways for achieving conservation targets under metacoupled anthropogenic disturbances

  Published on February 27, 2024
  We endeavored to model the connectivity between protected areas in rapidly urbanizing regions in China, drawing on insights from the framework of metacoupling based on connected corridors at short and long distances.

• NATURE - Triple win: Solar farms in deserts can boost power, incomes and ecosystems

  Published on February 20, 2024
  As land degradation becomes more severe (see Nature 623, 666; 2023), desert photovoltaics are a triple-win, fostering not only clean-energy generation but also ecosystem recovery and local poverty reduction.

• EARTH INTERACTIONS - Effects of payment for ecosystem services and tourism on conservation and development: trade-off or synergistic?

  Published on February 13, 2024
  We showed a trade-off between the ecological and economic effects of two PES programs, while synergistic effects exist in the ecological and economic benefits of tourism.

• NATURE COMMUNICATIONS - Global transboundary synergies and trade-offs among Sustainable Development Goals from an integrated sustainability perspective

  Published on January 13, 2024
  This study quantified the transboundary interactions between 768 pairs of SDG indicators. The results showed that high income countries comprised 14.18% of the global population, but contributed to total SDG interactions worldwide (60.60%).

• JOURNAL OF CLEANER PRODUCTION - Building smallholder-adapted climate-resilient systems: Evidence from China's apple farms

  Published on January 5, 2024
  We developed a smallholder-adapted climate-resilient system (SA-CRS) conceptual framework and applied this in an empirical assessment of the adaptation of smallholder apple farmers (SAFs) to the risk of low temperature during flowering (LTF) in China

• NATURE SUSTAINABILITY - Translating Earth system boundaries for cities and businesses

  Published on January 4, 2024
  We identify commonly used sharing approaches, illustrate ten principles of translation and present a protocol involving key building blocks and control steps in translation.