• Energy Research
• 12. Responsible consumption close
• EU close
• GB close
• IT close
• European Marine Science close

The biotechnological development has traditionally focused on the compliance with regulatory demands rather than optimising the processes or analysing their sustainability. This work proposes the combination of available tools for the comprehensive sustainability assessment of a blue biotechnology process based on the cultivation of the microalgae Haematococcus pluvialis. The work aims to include environmental, economic and social dimensions to measure the sustainability of the production of a carotenoid with potential applications in food, nutraceutical, cosmetics and eventually pharmaceutical industries. Electricity for cultivation was identified as the major contributor to the environmental impacts, which depended significantly on the production scale. Social benefits were mainly related to workers and consumers, while the economic assessment suggested a profitable process with a relatively short period to recover the initial investment.

A “Well-to-Propeller” Life Cycle Assessment of maritime transport was performed with a European geographical focus. Four typical types of vessels with specific operational profiles were assessed: a container vessel and a tanker (both with 2-stroke engines), a passenger roll-on/roll-off (Ro-Pax) and a cruise vessel (both with 4-stroke engines). All main engines were dual fuel operated with Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO) or Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG). Alternative onshore and offshore fuel supply chains were considered. Primary energy use and greenhouse gas emissions were assessed. Raw material extraction was found to be the most impactful life cycle stage (~90% of total energy use). Regarding greenhouse gases, liquefaction was the key issue. When transitioning from HFO to LNG, the systems were mainly influenced by a reduction in cargo capacity due to bunkering requirements and methane slip, which depends on the fuel supply chain (onshore has 64% more slip than offshore) and the engine type (4-stroke engines have 20% more slip than 2-stroke engines). The combination of alternative fuel supply chains and specific operational profiles allowed for a complete system assessment. The results demonstrated that multiple opposing drivers affect the environmental performance of maritime transport, a useful insight towards establishing emission abatement strategies.

Common-pool resources require a dose of self-restraint to ensure sustainable exploitation, but this has often proven elusive in practice. To understand why, and characterize behaviours towards ecological systems in general, we devised a social dilemma experiment in which participants gain profit from harvesting a virtual forest vulnerable to overexploitation. Out of 16 Chinese and 15 Spanish player groups, only one group from each country converged to the forest’s maximum sustainable yield. All other groups were overzealous, with about half of them surpassing or on the way to surpass a no-recovery threshold. Computational–statistical analyses attribute such outcomes to an interplay between three prominent player behaviours, two of which are subject to decision-making ‘inertia’ that causes near blindness to the resource state. These behaviours, being equally pervasive among players from both nations, imply that the commons fall victim to behavioural patterns robust to confounding factors such as age, education and culture.

An integrated understanding of both social and ecological aspects of environmental issues is essential to address pressing sustainability challenges. An integrated social-ecological systems perspective is purported to provide a better understanding of the complex relationships between humans and nature. Despite a threefold increase in the amount of social-ecological research published between 2010 and 2015, it is unclear whether these approaches have been truly integrative. We conducted a systematic literature review to investigate the conceptual, methodological, disciplinary, and functional aspects of social-ecological integration. In general, we found that overall integration is still lacking in social-ecological research. Some social variables deemed important for addressing sustainability challenges are underrepresented in social-ecological studies, e.g., culture, politics, and power. Disciplines such as ecology, urban studies, and geography are better integrated than others, e.g., sociology, biology, and public administration. In addition to ecology and urban studies, biodiversity conservation plays a key brokerage role in integrating other disciplines into social-ecological research. Studies founded on systems theory have the highest rates of integration. Highly integrative studies combine different types of tools, involve stakeholders at appropriate stages, and tend to deliver practical recommendations. Better social-ecological integration must underpin sustainability science. To achieve this potential, future social-ecological research will require greater attention to the following: the interdisciplinary composition of project teams, strategic stakeholder involvement, application of multiple tools, incorporation of both social and ecological variables, consideration of bidirectional relationships between variables, and identification of implications and articulation of clear policy recommendations.

Climate change and biodiversity loss trigger policies targeting and impacting local communities worldwide. However, research and policy implementation often fail to sufficiently consider community responses and to involve them. We present the results of a collective self-assessment exercise for eight case studies of communications with regard to climate change or biodiversity loss between project teams and local communities. We develop eight indicators of good stakeholder communication, reflecting the scope of Verran’s (2002) concept of postcolonial moments as a communicative utopia. We demonstrate that applying our indicators can enhance communication and enable community responses. However, we discover a divergence between timing, complexity and (introspective) effort. Three cases qualify for postcolonial moments, but scrutinising power relations and genuine knowledge co-production remain rare. While we verify the potency of various instruments for deconstructing science, their sophistication cannot substitute trust building and epistemic/transdisciplinary awareness. Lastly, we consider that reforming inadequate funding policies helps improving the work in and with local communities.

Recent assessment reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) have highlighted the risks to humanity arising from the unsustainable use of natural resources. Thus far, land, freshwater, and ocean exploitation have been the chief causes of biodiversity loss. Climate change is projected to be a rapidly increasing additional driver for biodiversity loss. Since climate change and biodiversity loss impact human societies everywhere, bold solutions are required that integrate environmental and societal objectives. As yet, most existing international biodiversity targets have overlooked climate change impacts. At the same time, climate change mitigation measures themselves may harm biodiversity directly. The Convention on Biological Diversity’s post-2020 framework offers the important opportunity to address the interactions between climate change and biodiversity and revise biodiversity targets accordingly by better aligning these with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals. We identify the considerable number of existing and proposed post-2020 biodiversity targets that risk being severely compromised due to climate change, even if other barriers to their achievement were removed. Our analysis suggests that the next set of biodiversity targets explicitly addresses climate change-related risks since many aspirational goals will not be feasible under even lower-end projections of future warming. Adopting more flexible and dynamic approaches to conservation, rather than static goals, would allow us to respond flexibly to changes in habitats, genetic resources, species composition, and ecosystem functioning and leverage biodiversity’s capacity to contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation.

The environmental sciences work with datasets every day. Recently, data sharing has become a more familiar activity for academic researchers. Records of marine litter are scarce and generally difficult to find worldwide, especially in databases. This work reviews and analyzes data repositories to identify the existence of datasets related to marine litter in Brazil. Only one global repository specializing in marine litter was found, and it is in the early stages of operation. Only two datasets about marine litter in Brazil were found in the generalist repository Figshare that do not follow all the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) for data sharing. A few initiatives are being developed aiming to collect and share marine litter data, but only one of them (Our Blue Hands) is already in place and uses a standardized, replicable method, and aims to share the data by design. Our work identified interoperability as the main point to be tackled within our context. In the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021–2030), it is essential that repositories are created, improved, and encouraged to address the specific needs of marine litter data-sharing and researchers' behavioral shift to start sharing the data already collected. Data sharing not only allows for the integrated vision of the academic community but can also contribute to public policies, helping decision-makers and encouraging a more sustainable science regarding financial and natural resource use.

In marine ecosystems, maximum sustainable yield considerations are affected by any substantial changes that occur in the top and bottom compartments of the food-web. This study explores how the southern North Sea's fisheries may need to adjust their fishing efforts to maintain optimum yields of sole, plaice, cod and brown shrimps under increased marine mammal populations and a reduced primary productivity. We constructed plausible scenarios of ongoing food-web changes using the results of Bayesian age-structured population models to estimate carrying capacities of harbour porpoises (Phocoena phocoena) and grey seals (Halichoerus grypus). Losses in primary productivity were predicted by lower trophic level ecosystem models. These scenarios were implemented in a food-web model of the southern North Sea. For each scenario, we sought mixed-fleet fishing efforts that would deliver maximum yields of sole, plaice, cod and brown shrimp combined. We also did so for a baseline run with unaltered mammal and primary production, and compared the differences in optimal fishing strategies, predicted yields, and states of the stocks between the scenarios. We found stocks and yields to be far more sensitive to changes in primary productivity than to increased marine mammal predation. The latter predominantly impacted cod, and even benefitted brown shrimps compared to the baseline run. Under 30% reduced primary productivity, fishing efforts had to be reduced by 50% to still provide maximum yields, whereas the marine mammal scenario induced no need to adjust the fishing regime. This draws attention to the potential gains of incorporating bottom-up processes into long-term management considerations, while marine mammal predation may be less of a concern, in particular for flatfish fisheries in the North Sea, and may even benefit shrimp trawlers because of reduced predation on shrimp from fish predators.