Global land is turning into an increasingly scarce resource. We here present a comprehensive assessment of co-occuring land-use change from 2000 until 2010, compiling existing spatially explicit data sources for different land uses, and building on a rich literature addressing specific land-use changes in all world regions. This review systematically categorizes patterns of land use, including regional urbanization and agricultural expansion but also globally telecoupled land-use change for all world regions. Managing land-use change patterns across the globe requires global governance.

Manhattan, Berlin and New Delhi all need to take action to adapt to climate change and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. While case studies on these cities provide valuable insights, comparability and scalability remain sidelined. It is therefore timely to review the state-of-the-art in data infrastructures, including earth observations, social media data, and how they could be better integrated to advance climate change science in cities and urban areas. We present three routes for expanding knowledge on global urban areas: mainstreaming data collections, amplifying the use of big data and taking further advantage of computational methods to analyse qualitative data to gain new insights. These data-based approaches have the potential to upscale urban climate solutions and effect change at the global scale.

This article raises awareness of how countries can leverage space and space technologies to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through concrete examples. Space science, technology and applications can support a range of pro-developmental activities, such as agricultural planning, biodiversity protection, tele-health and disaster management. United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) helps countries to use space technology in all of these areas, through capacity building and partnerships with government and private sector entities to expand access to space, especially for developing countries. This article also outlines the work of UNOOSA in promoting increased participation of women in the space sector and in STEM careers.

In this paper we discuss current challenges to the sustainability concept. This article focuses on seven dimensions of the concept. These dimensions are crucial for understanding sustainability. Even today, the literature contains basic misunderstandings about these seven dimensions. This article sketches such fallacies in the context of global and planetary sustainability. The sustainability concept has been criticized as a content-empty ‘fuzzy notion’ or non-committal ‘all-purpose glue’. This article thus has a critical intention of reflecting the sustainability concept accurately. The aim is to contribute a better understanding of the concept.

Global sustainability challenges and their impact on society have been well-documented in recent years, such as more intense extreme weather events, environmental degradation, as well as ecosystem and biodiversity loss. These challenges require a united effort of scientists from multiple disciplines with stakeholders, including government, non-government organizations, corporate industry, and members of the general public, with the aim to generate integrated knowledge with real-world applicability. Yet, there continues to be challenges for these types of collaboration. In this commentary, we describe processes of collective unlearning that serve to decenter academia in collaborations leading to a more equitable positioning of practitioners engaged in collaborative global sustainability research.

The principal policy focus for food has been to increase agricultural productivity and to liberalize markets allowing globalized trade. This focus has led to huge growth in the supply of agricultural produce, more calories becoming available, and price declining. The availability of cheaper calories increasingly underpins diets creating malnourishment through obesity, and global competition incentivizes producers who can produce the most, cheaply, typically with environmental damage. We propose re-focusing, away from yields per unit input, to the food system's overall productivity and efficiency – the number of people that can be fed healthily and sustainably per unit input.

Nature and culture are intricately linked and the rapid loss of both biological and cultural diversity around the globe has led to increasing concerns about its effects on sustainability. Important efforts to understand biocultural relations and bolster sustainable practices have been made by scientists, local communities, civil society organizations and policy makers. In spite of their efforts, a stronger articulation between sectors and biocultural discourses is needed for a broader transformative impact. Here, we analyse the connections between prominent biocultural discourses and discuss how the biocultural paradigm can contribute to both local and global sustainability.

We argue that the ways in which we as humans derive well-being from nature – for example by harvesting firewood, selling fish or enjoying natural beauty – feed back into how we behave towards the environment. This feedback is mediated by institutions (rules, regulations) and by individual capacities to act. Understanding these relationships can guide better interventions for sustainably improving well-being and alleviating poverty. However, more attention needs to be paid to how experience-related benefits from nature influence attitudes and actions towards the environment, and how these relationships can be reflected in more environmentally sustainable development projects.

One of the Sustainable Development Goals, number 10, is about reducing inequality within and between countries. This paper argues that the existing structure of the (international) financial system is, for various reasons, one of the determinants of (growing) inequality. This should receive more attention.

Sixty years of space activities have led to ongoing scientific and technological progress. Space 4.0 reflects the rapid changes of the space community. Growing interest in space activities leads to increasing participation of numerous new actors in this field. Governments, private actors and international organizations are eager to fill existing gaps in securing global society's needs. The European Space Agency's Space 4.0 concept is designed to host a new era of space activities, aiming to resolve global challenges and to serve society. Space 4.0 developments are highly important, but are taking place in an extremely complex net of legal, regulatory and political considerations. This paper focuses on the legal challenges raised by the new era of Space 4.0 in a sustainability context.

We present a view on global marine fisheries that emphasizes mitigating the conflict between sustainability and the scale of industrial exploitation driven by the demand of continuous economic growth. We then summarize the current state of global fisheries. Finally, we advocate strongly for scaling back industrial fisheries, most of which are non-sustainable. This can be achieved through eliminating the harmful, capacity-enhancing subsidies that prop up industrial fisheries to continue operating despite declining fish stocks. Instead, we propose to support well-managed, locally owned and operated small-scale fisheries, which generally contribute more to local employment and food security. We stress that contrary to deep-seated opinion in the fishing industry and among politicians, reducing overfishing by eliminating overcapacity in fishing fleets will actually lead to greater, not reduced catches. This would address part of the increased global seafood demand over the coming decades, which is driven by population and wealth growth. This seems counterintuitive, but is supported by fisheries science, data and experiences. Thankfully, we are beginning to see that some of these changes are being pursued by a growing number of countries and international institutions.

Most of the water humans consume is for agriculture. Rapidly increasing water demand has led to overexploitation of water resources in many important food-producing regions. In particular, growing groundwater-based irrigation causes potentially damaging depletion. Food systems are increasingly globalized, leading to large export-oriented production. Much research has focused on quantifying the amount of water resources embedded in traded products, but less attention has been given to the role of groundwater use and the related sustainability of agriculture globally. We assess current knowledge of virtual water trade in light of groundwater use and sustainability and highlight remaining challenges in this field.

Implementing the logical and ontological principles (dualism, mechanicism, reductionism, law of excluded middle, etc.) of modernity has brought forth an unsustainable world. An overcoming of these principles is proposed by mesology (Umweltlehre, fûdoron), centring on the concept of trajection and the existential operator as (als, en tant que).

Digitalization coevolves with and fosters three revolutions in urban transport: sharing, electrification and automatization. This dynamic poses severe risks for social and environmental sustainability. Only strong public policies can steer digitalization towards fostering sustainability in urban transport.

Although the concept of sustainable development is widely used as a guiding principle, there is much less consensus on its normative foundation and ethical implications. Since the 1880s, when social tensions threatened to tear apart European societies during the Industrial Revolution, Catholic social teaching (CST) has served as a sound basis for dialogue for many political leaders regardless of national or religious affiliation. This article examines how Pope Francis’ present-day CST might foster a cross-cultural debate on the ethics of economic growth, social and ecological justice and civil participation on Planet Earth as well as in outer space.

Projections of a burgeoning population coupled with global environmental change offer an increasingly dire picture of the state of the world's food security in the not-too-distant future. But how can we transform the current food system to become more sustainable, more equitable and more just? We identify kitchens as sites of transformative innovation in the food system where cooks and chefs can leverage traditional food knowledge about local food species to create delicious and nutritious dishes. Achieving a sustainable food system is a grand challenge, one where cooks in particular are stepping forward as innovators to find solutions.

Mining regions are affected by climate change. Supplies of energy and water are required, and operations become hazardous during adverse weather events. Adapting to climate change takes three forms: incrementally improving the resilience of mining operations; transitioning to more inclusive governance through institutional and policy innovations; and more profound transformations that shift the balance of power, including profit-sharing, localized control or cessation of mining entirely. Clarifying adaptation pathways helps to identify priorities and inform policies for a fairer and more sustainable future for mining and the regions where it takes place.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and targets are an important achievement. They largely reflect the worldview of Modernity, with its emphasis on scientific and planning rationality and emancipatory ideals. This worldview is no longer evident and dominant, and it is time to systematically explore complementing worldviews. Explicit use of worldviews, as sets of values and beliefs, and ethics enriches the interpretation and implementation of the SDGs. This facilitates the engagement of citizens in their real-world diversity and the development of respect for and empathy and cooperation with people holding other values, beliefs and morals. Dialogue around ‘the middle road’ can give guidance to just, fair and sustainable development pathways.

There are significant challenges to retaining indigenous biodiversity and ecological infrastructure in African cities. These include a lack of formal protection and status for remnant ecologically functional patches rendering them open to ad hoc human settlement, which is in part linked to weak governance and management emerging from complex histories, and competing crisis-ridden demands. Persistent gaps in knowledge and practice mean that the social, economic, development and well-being benefits of ecological infrastructure are not understood or demonstrated. Addressing these challenges requires the adoption of multiple top-down government interventions and bottom-up community and neighbourhood actions. The development of detailed case studies that engage with knowledge generation and sharing at multiple scales through co-learning practices will also help create a much-needed deeper understanding of development options within this context.

This perspective article from the co-chairs of the United Nations Environment Programme's Sixth Global Environment Outlook (GEO-6) uses the assessment of the literature in the GEO-6 to show how a healthy planet and healthy people are linked together. It argues that the health of the planet is deteriorating and that this deteriorating ecosystem health has major direct and indirect impacts on human health and well-being. Direct impacts include the impacts of polluted air on the lungs of people, while indirect impacts include the impacts of land degradation on food security. Therefore, protecting the environment will also have major benefits for human health and well-being.