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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.

The 2016 Paris Agreement (UNFCCC Authors, 2015) is the latest of initiative to create an international consensus on action to reduce GHG emissions. However, the challenge of meeting its targets lies mainly in the intimate relationship between GHG emissions and energy production, which in turn links to industry and economic growth. The Middle East and North African region (MENA), particularly those nations rich oil and gas (O&G) resources, depend on these as a main income source. Persuading the region to cut down on O&G production or reduce its GHG emissions is hugely challenging, as it is so vital to its economic strength. In this paper, an alternative option is established by creating an economic link between GHG emissions, measured as their CO2 equivalent (CO2e), and the earning of profits through the concept of Social Carbon Cost (SCC). The case study is a small coastal city in Libya where 6% of electricity is assumed to be generated from renewable sources. At times when renewable energy (RE) output exceeds the demand for power, the surplus is used for powering the production of hydrogen by electrolysis, thus storing the energy and creating an emission-free fuel. Two scenarios are tested based on short and long term SCCs. In the short term scenario, the amount of fossil fuel energy saved matches the renewable energy produced, which equates to the same amount of curtailed O&G production. The O&G-producing region can earn profits in two ways: (1) by cutting down CO2 emissions as a result of a reduction in O&G production and (2) by replacing an amount of fossil fuel with electrolytically-produced hydrogen which creates no CO2 emissions. In the short term scenario, the value of SCC saved is nearly 39% and in the long term scenario, this rose to 83%.

We briefly consider the tensions between climate change and energy security policy imperatives, and highlight some concepts that may bring additional clarity to decision-making at the nexus of the two areas. We focus on developing countries and use the case of the Medupi supercritical coal plant in South Africa. The justification for the plant's construction stemmed from an Integrated Resource Planning process informed by South Africa's national utility. Often, as in the case of South Africa, there are tensions not easily captured in quantitative algorithms between, inter alia, a lack of access to electricity by millions of people (and associated welfare losses) and greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation. It is difficult to identify any formal processes that have prioritised climate change considerations over those of energy access. Thus, it becomes imperative to have a clear understanding of the consequences of this reality when considering power system expansion. We find that the processes often employed do not provide an entirely satisfactory precedent for future planning analyses, and the justifications do not adequately reflect the complexity of the decision space. Finally, we highlight some options by which these tools might be enhanced in areas including explicit and formal consideration of risk.

A growing body of literature discusses the CO _2 emissions of cities. Still, little is known about emission patterns across density gradients from remote rural places to highly urbanized areas, the drivers behind those emission patterns and the global emissions triggered by consumption in human settlements—referred to here as the carbon footprint. In this letter we use a hybrid method for estimating the carbon footprints of cities and other human settlements in the UK explicitly linking global supply chains to local consumption activities and associated lifestyles. This analysis comprises all areas in the UK, whether rural or urban. We compare our consumption-based results with extended territorial CO _2 emission estimates and analyse the driving forces that determine the carbon footprint of human settlements in the UK. Our results show that 90% of the human settlements in the UK are net importers of CO _2 emissions. Consumption-based CO _2 emissions are much more homogeneous than extended territorial emissions. Both the highest and lowest carbon footprints can be found in urban areas, but the carbon footprint is consistently higher relative to extended territorial CO _2 emissions in urban as opposed to rural settlement types. The impact of high or low density living remains limited; instead, carbon footprints can be comparatively high or low across density gradients depending on the location-specific socio-demographic, infrastructural and geographic characteristics of the area under consideration. We show that the carbon footprint of cities and other human settlements in the UK is mainly determined by socio-economic rather than geographic and infrastructural drivers at the spatial aggregation of our analysis. It increases with growing income, education and car ownership as well as decreasing household size. Income is not more important than most other socio-economic determinants of the carbon footprint. Possibly, the relationship between lifestyles and infrastructure only impacts carbon footprints significantly at higher spatial granularity.

Consumption-based CO2 emission (CBE) accounting shows the possibility of global carbon leakage. Very little attention has been paid to the amount of emissions related to the consumption of products and services and their impact on sustainable development goals (SDGs), especially in the SAARC region. This study used a CBE accounting method to measure the CO2 emissions of five major SAARC member countries. Additionally, a Fully Modified Ordinary Least Square (FMOLS) and a causality model were used to investigate the long-term effects of the CBE and SDG variables between 1972 and 2015. The results showed that household consumption contributed more than 62.39% of CO2 emissions overall in the SAARC region. India had the highest household emissions, up to 37.27%, and Nepal contributed the lowest, up to 0.61%. The total imported emissions were the greatest in India (16.88 Gt CO2) and Bangladesh (15.90 Gt CO2). At the same time, the results for the long-term relationships between the CBEs and SDGs of the SAARC region showed that only the combustible renewables and waste (CRW) variable is significant for most of these countries. The sharing of the responsibility for emissions between suppliers and customers could encourage governments and policymakers to make global climate policy and sustainable development decisions, which are currently stalled by questions over geographical and past emission inequities.

As the largest export sector and a major employer for Fiji, tourism is probably highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change due to the sector’s dependence on environment and climate. This paper evaluates the conduciveness of Fiji’s policy environment for tourism adaptation to climate change. It analyses how Fiji’s policies (both explicit and implicit) in climate change, tourism, environmental and disaster management address tourism adaptation types as well as characteristics of Small Island Developing States and Territories (SIDST) that make them especially vulnerable to climate change. The paper concludes that Fiji does provide a reasonably conducive policy environment for its tourism to adapt, but some important adaptation issues still remain as policy gaps. The Fijian government shows an intention to integrate climate change into sectoral policies, but it is yet to be mainstreamed into the tourism sector. Most of the initiatives are policy-level adaptation with research and education the second adaptation type relatively well addressed. Other aspects of adaptation, particularly technical, business management and behavioural adaptations, need to be more comprehensively addressed in Fiji. Based on these identified policy gaps, the paper recommends that the tourism sector in Fiji needs to deal with challenges in raising awareness of climate change issues, building financial and human resources capacities and ensuring policy implementation.

AbstractTraditional consumption-based greenhouse gas emissions accounting attributed the gap between consumption-based and production-based emissions to international trade. Yet few attempts have analyzed the temporal deviation between current emissions and future consumption, which can be explained through changes in capital stock. Here we develop a dynamic model to incorporate capital stock change in consumption-based accounting. The new model is applied using global data for 1995–2009. Our results show that global emissions embodied in consumption determined by the new model are smaller than those obtained from the traditional model. The emissions embodied in global capital stock increased steadily during the period. However, capital plays very different roles in shaping consumption-based emissions for economies with different development characteristics. As a result, the dynamic model yields similar consumption-based emissions estimation for many developed countries comparing with the traditional model, but it highlights the dynamics of fast-developing countries.

Heat extremes (ie, heatwaves) already have a serious impact on human health, with ageing, poverty, and chronic illnesses as aggravating factors. As the global community seeks to contend with even hotter weather in the future as a consequence of global climate change, there is a pressing need to better understand the most effective prevention and response measures that can be implemented, particularly in low-resource settings. In this Series paper, we describe how a future reliance on air conditioning is unsustainable and further marginalises the communities most vulnerable to the heat. We then show that a more holistic understanding of the thermal environment at the landscape and urban, building, and individual scales supports the identification of numerous sustainable opportunities to keep people cooler. We summarise the benefits (eg, effectiveness) and limitations of each identified cooling strategy, and recommend optimal interventions for settings such as aged care homes, slums, workplaces, mass gatherings, refugee camps, and playing sport. The integration of this information into well communicated heat action plans with robust surveillance and monitoring is essential for reducing the adverse health consequences of current and future extreme heat.