A global agreement to end plastic pollution must be based on pertinent, multi-disciplinary knowledge. Consideration of the full life cycle impacts of plastics and substitutes is important to achieve sustainable solutions rather than shifting the burden. Hence, this process requires considerations of fossil-based and biobased feedstocks for plastic...
Effective policies to halt biodiversity loss require knowing which anthropogenic drivers are the most important direct causes. Whereas previous knowledge has been limited in scope and rigor, here we statistically synthesize empirical comparisons of recent driver impacts found through a wide-ranging review. We show that land/sea use change has been...
Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) has been implemented over the past decade, and has led to a restructuring of forest governance systems in host countries. In the case of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, which is promoting REDD+, activities have been implemented at national, sub-national and project scales...
Contamination by microplastics has become a burning environmental concern due to their rapid distribution in the oceans. Oceans receive a large number of microplastics annually via river waters, direct dumping, and transportation. The cargo ship of X-Press Pearl was sunken in the seabed at a depth of about 21 m which was anchored off Colombo Port...
This chapter contributes to a comprehensive understanding of the island socio-ecological system by a synthesis of the state and trend of, and the drivers of changes in ecosystems and their services, focusing on mangroves in Ishigaki Island. The current extent of mangroves on the Island is limited to small patches along a few river estuaries, which...
A hallmark of the media publicity surrounding COVID-19 has been the message that land change causes zoonotic diseases to spill over from wild animals to humans. The secondary peer-reviewed literature sends a similar message. However, as indicated in the primary peer-reviewed literature, the complexity of interacting variables involved in zoonotic...
Place attachment and ecocentric attitude are the important determinants of conservation behaviour, especially for traditionally managed landscapes. In this paper, we explore the relationship between place attachment and the ecocentric attitude of farmers engaged in Jhum cultivation (aka shifting/slash and burn cultivation) in the Zunheboto district...
This study’s objective is to examine how ASEAN countries reported their environment-related policies for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in their Voluntary National Reviews (VNRs), and a dataset of their environmental policies was developed. This is a necessary first step in analyzing the reasons for insufficient progress on the...
A city region is a unit comprising an urban core and surrounding peri-urban and, occasionally, rural areas. The Regional Circulating and Ecological Sphere (R-CES) proposed by the Japanese government is a guiding approach for policymaking that prioritises the harmonised flow of resources between urban and rural areas, low-carbon society, circular...
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) present a complex system of 17 goals and 169 individual targets whose interactions can be described in terms of co-benefits and trade-offs between policy actions. We analyse in detail target-by-target interlinkage networks established by the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) SDG...