Small-scale fisheries play a significant but overlooked role in global fisheries production and are key to addressing hunger and malnutrition while supporting livelihoods around the world, according to research featured on the cover of Nature. The data and methodology for this paper were produced within the framework of the Illuminating Hidden Harvests initiative conducted by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Duke University, and WorldFish.

We provide the first global assessment of the status of preferential access areas (PAAs), a relatively understudied policy tool to govern small-scale fisheries. We find 44 countries, most of them of low or low-middle income, have established a total of 63 PAAs encompassing 3% of continental shelf area worldwide.

A positive correlation between wealth and biodiversity within cities is a commonly documented phenomenon in urban ecology that has come to be labeled as the “luxury effect.” We contend that both this language and this framing restrict our understanding of how sociopolitical power dynamics influence biodiversity within and across cities. We describe how the term “luxury” is not appropriately applied to describe patterns of biodiversity and how the pattern depends on the form(s) of biodiversity investigated.

Electricity demand growth has accelerated significantly, a trend that is expected to continue for at least the next 5 to 10 years and is driven by new technologies such as data centers and the expansion of the manufacturing and industrial base in the United States. This analysis uses a variety of integrated resource plans from utilities and other groups to estimate how overall electricity demand may change over the next decade in several scenarios.

The HeatWise Policy Partnership Summit is a key component of a cyclical two-year program that encompasses stakeholder engagement, event planning, biannual convening, reporting key findings, and outreach to policymakers.

Despite growing interest and investment in nature-based solutions such as living shorelines in the United States, it has been difficult to expand their use. One major hurdle is permitting challenges. Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia are three states where living shoreline installations have increased. We examined what policy conditions exist in these locations to enable project permitting, as well as how to address any remaining hurdles.

The People’s Republic of China is using the national emissions trading scheme (ETS) as a tool to bend the country’s emissions curve while cleaning its domestic environment, driving innovation, and capturing a greater share of high-value segments of the global economy. This background paper for the Asia-Pacific Climate Report 2024: Catalyzing Finance and Policy Solutions first explores the origins of the ETS and then looks at its characteristics and performance.

Can low- and middle-income countries meet human development imperatives while decommissioning fossil fuel infrastructure or avoiding further fossil fuel development? A high-level panel at Climate Week NYC 2024—moderated by Jackson Ewing and featuring executive in residence Alix Peterson Zwane alongside global investment leaders—attempted to address just that.

Across all available literature, effectiveness data on plastic pollution clean-up technologies were under-reported, lacked standardization, and were rarely tested by a neutral third party. This makes it difficult to make informed decisions when choosing which clean-up technology to deploy and evaluating the environmental impact of these technologies.

Ecological restoration programs increasingly aim to provide socioeconomic and environmental benefits. However, monitoring of socioeconomic outcomes of these programs lags behind monitoring of ecological outcomes. Socioeconomic methods are less established, managers have less experience, and metrics used vary, stymieing evaluation and adaptive management. Here we demonstrate that logic models and stakeholder engagement can be used to identify core socioeconomic metrics across various types of restoration, focusing on coastal restoration in the Gulf of Mexico.