The article addresses the role of science in the present global ecological crisis, both as a factor in bringing it about and as a means to confront it. It is argued that the history of science, pursued in a global and long-term perspective, is an important knowledge resource for understanding the development of science in society. Pivotal episodes from that history, ranging from the origin of science in antiquity via the early modern scientific revolution to recent developments in industrial societies, are discussed with a particular emphasis on the case of China and with a view to the present crisis.

Until the past half-century, all agriculture and land management was framed by local institutions strong in social capital. But neoliberal forms of development came to undermine existing structures, thus reducing sustainability and equity. The past 20 years, though, have seen the deliberate establishment of more than 8 million new social groups across the world. This restructuring and growth of rural social capital within specific territories is leading to increased productivity of agricultural and land management systems, with particular benefits for those previously excluded. Further growth would occur with more national and regional policy support.

There is a call to change societies to become more sustainable. We examine how the concept of sustainability transformation has been used and find that it has been defined in many ways. The concept is still used without many real-world examples – we found only four studies that had assessed whether a multi-sectoral sustainability transformation had taken place. There is a need to further clarify what sustainability transformation means and how it can be assessed.

Lessons from the corona crisis can help manage the even more daunting challenge of anthropogenic global warming.

COVID-19 has shone a bright light on a number of failings and weaknesses in how current economic models handle information and knowledge. Some of these are familiar issues that have long been understood but not acted upon effectively – for example, the danger that current systems of intellectual property and patent protection are actually inimical to delivering a cost-effective vaccine available to all, whereas treating knowledge as a commons and a public good is much more likely to deliver efficient outcomes for the entire global population. But COVID-19 has also demonstrated that traditional models of knowledge production and dissemination are failing us; scientific knowledge is becoming weaponized and hyper-partisan, and confidence in this knowledge is falling. We believe that the challenges that COVID-19 has exposed in the information economy and ecology will be of increasing applicability across the whole spectrum of sustainability; sustainability scholars and policymakers need to understand and grasp them now if we are to avoid contagion into other sectors due to the preventable errors that have marred the global response to COVID-19.

The various crises that have emerged since 2000 are driven by an increasing maladaptation of our societies’ information processing capabilities to the dynamics in which our societies find themselves. These capabilities have been built up path dependently over centuries, and to understand them we need to look closely at their history. Changes in technology, demography and resource use and environmental change are all part of a co-evolution in which societies’ information processing capacities play a central role. The information and communications technology revolution has accelerated developments in all of these domains and has weakened some fundamental institutions. This paper discusses how these processes might affect the long-term future of our societies.

We interviewed grassroots food innovators in South Africa to explore the diverse ways in which their narratives expressed different capacities for resilience, such as dealing with surprise and shaping desirable change. We drew on key resilience themes of rootedness, resourcefulness and resistance (the 3Rs) as lenses through which to view their personal stories and efforts to build resilience and reshape the future. We used narrative and interpretative methods to connect the personal and context-specific experiences of food innovators to the 3Rs, exploring a new approach to uncovering resilience capacities. We suggest that this approach could be usefully employed to understand potential resilience capacities that could help address diverse sustainability challenges around the world.

The ‘climate crisis’ describes human-caused global warming and climate change and its consequences. It conveys the sense of urgency surrounding humanity's failure to take sufficient action to slow down, stop and reverse global warming. The leading direct cause of the climate crisis is carbon dioxide (CO2) released as a by-product of burning fossil fuels,i which supply ~87% of the world's energy. The second most important cause of the climate crisis is deforestation to create more land for crops and livestock. The solutions have been stated as simply ‘leave the fossil carbon in the ground’ and ‘end deforestation’. Rather than address fossil fuel supplies, climate policies focus almost exclusively on the demand side, blaming fossil fuel users for greenhouse gas emissions. The fundamental reason that we are not solving the climate crisis is not a lack of green energy solutions. It is that governments continue with energy strategies that prioritize fossil fuels. These entrenched energy policies subsidize the discovery, extraction, transport and sale of fossil fuels, with the aim of ensuring a cheap, plentiful, steady supply of fossil energy into the future. This paper compares the climate crisis to two other environmental crises: ozone depletion and the COVID-19 pandemic. Halting and reversing damage to the ozone layer is one of humanity's greatest environmental success stories. The world's response to COVID-19 demonstrates that it is possible for governments to take decisive action to avert an imminent crisis. The approach to solving both of these crises was the same: (1) identify the precise cause of the problem through expert scientific advice; (2) with support by the public, pass legislation focused on the cause of the problem; and (3) employ a robust feedback mechanism to assess progress and adjust the approach. This is not yet being done to solve the climate crisis, but working within the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement framework, it could be. Every nation can contribute to solving the climate crisis by: (1) changing their energy strategy to green energy sources instead of fossil fuels; and (2) critically reviewing every law, policy and trade agreement (including transport, food production, food sources and land use) that affects the climate crisis.

COVID-19 has stimulated calls for a ‘global reset’ to address major global challenges and ‘build back better’. This Intelligence Briefing makes the case that the experience of COVID-19 itself, particularly the way it reverberated across multiple systems, shines light on the vital steps needed to advance a global reset. It brings together the evidence that the causes, severity and effects of COVID-19 cut across multiple interconnected systems, notably environmental, health, political, social, economic and food systems, as did the responses to it. All of these systems affected each other: responses implemented to address problems in one system inevitably led to effects on others. This Intelligence Briefing uses this evidence to identify five practical steps needed to advance a global reset. First, train systems leaders. Second, employ a new cadre of ‘systems connectors’. Third, identify solutions across systems. Fourth, manage trade-offs for the long and short term. Fifth, kick-start system redesign for co-benefits. Implementing these steps will be extraordinarily challenging, especially given the short-term imperative to ‘bounce back’. But for any business, organization, government or United Nations agency serious about addressing long-term sustainability challenges, the opportunity is there to use these five practical actions to press the global reset button.

Resources are the basis of our economy and their provision causes major shares of the global environmental burdens, many of which are beyond safe limits today. In order to be sustainable, our economy needs to be able to operate within those boundaries. As resources are the physical ‘currency’ of our economy, we present a method that allows translating Earth system boundaries into resource budgets. This ecological resource availability determines the global annual production of a resource that can be considered absolutely sustainable. The budgets can be managed like financial budgets, bringing absolute environmental limits one step closer to decision-makers.

This paper investigates analogies in the dynamics of Covid-19 pandemic and climate change. A comparison of their common features (such as nonlinearity and inertia) and differences helps us to achieve a correct scientific perception of both situations, increasing the chances of actions for their solutions. Besides, applying to both the risk equation provides different angles to analyse them, something that may result useful especially at the policy level. It shows that not only short-term interventions are needed, but also long-term strategies involving some structural changes. More specifically, it also shows that, even if climate change is probably more critical and long-lasting than the Covid-19 crisis, we still have, at least currently, more options for reducing its related risk.

The COVID-19 pandemic can be considered an experiment forced upon the world community and, as such, responses to the pandemic can provide lessons about socio-ecological systems as well as processes of transformative change. What enabled responses to COVID-19 to be as effective as they were, right at a time when climate action is notably lagging behind what intergovernmental panels have called for? This paper examines key differences in the COVID-19 response compared to that of climate change, examining the ‘deeper’ human dimensions of these global issues. Unearthing insights into the responses to both issues provides important lessons for climate change engagement.

The sustainability concept seeks to balance how present and future generations of humans meet their needs. But because nature is viewed only as a resource, sustainability fails to recognize that humans and other living beings depend on each other for their well-being. We therefore argue that true sustainability can only be achieved if the interdependent needs of all species of current and future generations are met, and propose calling this ‘multispecies sustainability’. We explore the concept through visualizations and scenarios, then consider how it might be applied through case studies involving bees and healthy green spaces.

Lamb et al. (2020) identified 12 discourses used by a counter-movement to delay or weaken action to limit climate change. This commentary notes three discourses used by those promoting such action that can also delay meaningful action: insisting on transformational change to the exclusion of incremental change, downplaying the value of emissions targets, and focusing attention on adaptation.

A small benefit of the disastrous COVID-19 pandemic has been the temporary reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, this paper asks: what strategies can return people to work without returning to the old high-emissions economy? How can we modify the old economic system to reduce environmental impacts while rebuilding employment? Technological change, such as replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy (RE), is necessary but, in an economy that's growing, unlikely to be sufficiently rapid to avoid dangerous climate change. Degrowth in physical consumption, especially by the ‘rich’ 10%, towards a steady-state economy, is needed as well as low-carbon jobs.

Many countries are committed to emerge from COVID 19 on a more sustainable environmental footing. Here we explore what such a structurally transformative recovery would mean for the manufacturing sector of 14 major economies. We find that all countries have zero-carbon growth opportunities post-COVID and comparative advantages in some sectors, but industrialised countries and the East Asian economies, especially South Korea, appear best positioned, thanks a push in low-carbon innovation that predates the pandemic.