Conservation diplomacy as part of multilateral strategies for global peace and sustainability
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Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are emerging water contaminants with significant environmental and health impacts, posing challenges in water treatment due to their high stability and persistence. With increasing regulations, a critical need remains in understanding the sustainability of PFAS treatment technologies. Our review examines the environmental, economic, and social impacts of current PFAS treatment technologies across different water types and contexts. Additionally, we propose a framework for future sustainability studies to enable more holistic technology evaluations under specific conditions.
Digital technologies for construction sustainability: Status quo, challenges, and future prospects
The nexus between digital technologies (DTs) and sustainability in the built environment has attracted increasing research interest in recent years, yet understanding DT utilization and its impact on construction processes remains fragmented. To address this gap, this study conducts a systematic review of the construction sustainability literature to analyze and synthesize research findings on the application of DTs at various stages of the construction lifecycle. We undertake an in-depth content analysis of 72 articles, with findings revealing that prominent DTs for construction sustainability include building information modeling, the Internet of Things, big data, and artificial intelligence. We also identify that the application of DTs for sustainability across the construction lifecycle is clustered in four areas: namely (1) integration and collaboration; (2) optimization, simulation, and decision-making; (3) tracking, monitoring, and control; and (4) training. Based on existing knowledge gaps, future research opportunities are identified, including the development of integrated and interoperable systems, long-term performance and resilience, and advanced simulation and modeling techniques. This study contributes to the literature on construction digitalization by offering a complete overview of research investigations in relation to construction sustainability and identifying research crucial to advancing a DT-enabled sustainable built environment.
Assessing the effectiveness of interdependent corporate sustainability choices
Lowering the environmental externalities of business operations while preserving firms’ value is a challenging task that involves complex sustainability decisions. These decisions require navigating highly interconnected choices of actions and goals that characterise companies’ sustainability behaviour. Here, we develop an empirical framework to investigate the implications of choice interdependence on companies’ integrated financial and environmental performance. Our results suggest that the sustainability choices of companies in energy and energy-intensive sectors emerge from effective decision-making processes and have a larger impact on performance than random allocation of actions. However, comparing the behaviour of companies in our sample with hypothetical quasioptimal (“satisficing”) choices, we observe a considerable under-performance, a low choice differentiation across the population, a significant over-investment in risk mitigation activities, and under-investment in developing innovation capabilities. Overall, our study provides a framework for evaluating companies’ contribution to a sustainable low-carbon transition and highlights critical gaps in corporates’ environmental actions.
A case for assemblage-level conservation to address the biodiversity crisis
Traditional conservation efforts have centred on safeguarding individual species, but these strategies have limitations in a world where entire ecosystems are rapidly changing. Ecosystem conservation can maintain critical ecological functions, but often lacks the detail necessary for the effective conservation of threatened or endangered species. The conservation of such species is mandated by policies and remains a dominant focus of natural resource management. In this Perspective, we propose that assemblage-level conservation targeting groups of taxonomically related or functionally similar species can bridge the gap between species and ecosystems and help to address global biodiversity loss. This approach has previously been limited by data and methodological constraints, but the ongoing growth of biodiversity data, advances in ecological modelling and breakthroughs in computational power have now made effective assemblage-level conservation feasible. Community models provide insights at both the species level and the assemblage level while appropriately accounting for species variability in detection during sampling and uncertainty in biological inferences. Assemblage-level conservation can link both species-specific needs and broader ecological dynamics, ultimately enabling effective strategies for conserving threatened species, ecological communities and ecosystem functions.
Comparing expedient and proactive approaches to the planning of protected area networks on Borneo
Protected areas are an important tool for wildlife conservation; however, research is increasingly revealing both biases and inadequacies in the global protected area network. One common criticism is that protected areas are frequently located in remote, high-elevation regions, which may face fewer threats compared to more accessible locations. To explore the conservation implications of this issue, we consider a thought experiment with seven different counterfactual scenarios for the Sunda clouded leopard’s conservation on Borneo. This allows us to examine two contrasting paradigms for conservation: “proactive conservation” which prioritises areas with high biodiversity and high risk of development, and “expedient conservation” which focusses on areas with the lowest development risk. We select clouded leopards as our focal species not only because of their emerging conservation importance, but also because, as top predators, they represent both keystone species and ambassadors for wider forest biodiversity. Furthermore, a published analysis of the likely impacts of forest loss in their habitat provides a benchmark for evaluating the modelled outcomes of alternative hypothetical conservation scenarios. We find that, across all metrics, expedient reserve design offered few benefits over the business-as-usual scenario, in contrast to the much greater conservation effectiveness of proactive protected area design. This paper sheds light on the challenging trade-offs between conservation goals and the competing land uses essential for the economic development and well-being of local communities.
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