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Land use is central to addressing sustainability issues, including biodiversity conservation, climate change, food security, poverty alleviation, and sustainable energy. In this paper, we synthesize knowledge accumulated in land system science, the integrated study of terrestrial social-ecological systems, into 10 hard truths that have strong, general, empirical support. These facts help to explain the challenges of achieving sustainability in land use and thus also point toward solutions. The 10 facts are as follows: 1) Meanings and values of land are socially constructed and contested; 2) land systems exhibit complex behaviors with abrupt, hard-to-predict changes; 3) irreversible changes and path dependence are common features of land systems; 4) some land uses have a small footprint but very large impacts; 5) drivers and impacts of land-use change are globally interconnected and spill over to distant locations; 6) humanity lives on a used planet where all land provides benefits to societies; 7) land-use change usually entails trade-offs between different benefits—"win–wins" are thus rare; 8) land tenure and land-use claims are often unclear, overlapping, and contested; 9) the benefits and burdens from land are unequally distributed; and 10) land users have multiple, sometimes conflicting, ideas of what social and environmental justice entails. The facts have implications for governance, but do not provide fixed answers. Instead they constitute a set of core principles which can guide scientists, policy makers, and practitioners toward meeting sustainability challenges in land use.

Urban greenery is a natural solution to cool cities and provide comfort, clean air and significant social, health and economic benefits. This paper aims to present the latest progress on the field of greenery urban mitigation techniques including aspects related to the theoretical and experimental assessment of the greenery cooling potential, the impact on urban vegetation on energy, health and comfort and the acquired knowledge on the best integration of the various types of greenery in the urban frame. Also to present the recent knowledge on the impact of climate change on the cooling performance of urban vegetation and investigate and analyse possible technological solutions to face the impact of high ambient temperatures.

Considering the remarkable relevance of acetylated derivatives of phenols, alcohols, and aryl and alkyl thiols in different areas of biology, as well as in synthetic organic chemistry, a sustainable solvent-free approach to perform acetylation reactions is proposed here. Acetylation reactions are classically performed using excess of acetic anhydride (Ac2O) in solvent-free conditions or by eventually working with stoichiometric amounts of Ac2O in organic solvents; both methods require the addition of basic or acid catalysts to promote the esterification. Therefore, they usually lead to the generation of high amounts of wastes, which sensibly raise the E-factor of the process. With the aim to develop a more sustainable system, a solvent-free, stoichiometric acetylation protocol is, thus, proposed. The naturally occurring phenol, thymol, can be converted to the corresponding—biologically active—ester with good yields, in the presence of 1% of VOSO4. Interestingly, the process can be efficiently adopted to synthesize other thymyl esters, as well as to perform acetylation of alcohols and aryl and alkyl thiols. Remarkably, a further improvement has been achieved replacing Ac2O with its greener alternative, isopropenyl acetate (IPA).

Rural residential settings are important elements of livable and sustainable rural areas across the world. Enhancing people’s attachment to these landscapes through fostering feelings of homesickness could help in the pursuit of better rural residential settings. We studied homesickness, an emotion found to be associated with higher place attachment and quality of life, related to rural landscapes in southeast China, looking specifically at the presence and configuration of rural dwellings and trees. We used Photoshop to manipulate different configurations of typical rural dwellings and trees, and three series with twelve types of landscape scenes were generated. We looked at the following six emotional factors linked to homesickness: naturalness; regional culture; identity; psychology; experience; and landscape aesthetics. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and semantic differential (SD) methods were used to evaluate the level in which the landscape evoked feelings of homesickness amongst study participants, i.e., a group of university students from different disciplines. Results show that the homesickness emotional response level was higher in most of the simulated landscapes, as compared to the original landscape, and that response levels differed significantly between the three types of visualized landscape configurations. The emotional response level showed differences for manipulated landscape scenes with twelve different trees added to dwellings. Through cluster analysis of the results, we divided trees into three grades of emotional response for each dwelling type. Adding trees thus was found to change the emotional response to the landscape, and different tree configurations with different types of dwellings results in different responses. The study shows that careful design of the rural landscape can help build stronger emotional relations of humans with their local environment, which is a key ingredient for sustainable countryside living.

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) and their Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) have attracted great interest for automatic management of industrial infrastructures, such as water and wastewater systems. A range of technologies can be employed for wastewater treatment CPS to manage risks and protect the infrastructures of water systems and their wastewater against cyberattacks. In this paper, we develop a novel risk assessment framework, named RAF-CPWS, which perfectly estimates the risks of water and wastewater technologies. To do this, a multi-criteria group decision-making (MCGDM) approach is designed by neutrosophic theory to assess the risks of wastewater treatment technologies (WWTTs). The proposed approach evaluates the best WWTTs, considering various economic, environmental, technological and cybersecurity, and social factors. A decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) is employed to evaluate the significance of the adopted factors in a real testbed setting. The proposed approach contributes to a comprehensive measure of WWTTs through several factors, revealing its high sustainability and security in assessing the risks of cyber-physical water and wastewater systems.

The international community has committed to combat climate change and achieve 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Here we explore (dis)connections in evidence and governance between these commitments. Our structured evidence review suggests that climate change can undermine 16 SDGs, while combatting climate change can reinforce all 17 SDGs but undermine efforts to achieve 12. Understanding these relationships requires wider and deeper interdisciplinary collaboration. Climate change and sustainable development governance should be better connected to maximize the effectiveness of action in both domains. The emergence around the world of new coordinating institutions and sustainable development planning represents promising progress.

In 2013, the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) launched the hydrological decade 2013–2022 with the theme “Panta Rhei: Change in Hydrology and Society”. The decade recognizes the urgency of hydrological research to understand and predict the interactions of society and water, to support sustainable water resource use under changing climatic and environmental conditions. This paper reports on the first Panta Rhei biennium 2013–2015, providing a comprehensive resource that describes the scope and direction of Panta Rhei. We bring together the knowledge of all the Panta Rhei working groups, to summarize the most pressing research questions and how the hydrological community is progressing towards those goals. We draw out interconnections between different strands of research, and reflect on the need to take a global view on hydrology in the current era of human impacts and environmental change. Finally, we look back to the six driving science questions identified at the outset of Panta Rhei, to quantify progress towards those aims.