Given land-use change threatening both biodiversity and traditional extractive livelihoods since 2004, an action research process in Minas Gerais (Brazil) has focused on the management of two endemic species: the giant earthworm Rhinodrilus alatus and the pequi tree Caryocar brasiliense. Socio-ecological assessments, ecological field surveys and market analyses generated the evidence that extractivists and public institutions used to negotiate management agreements. Despite more than a decade of institutional uncertainty and the absence of formal regulation, local actors maintained voluntary harvesting restrictions, including a closed season during the reproductive period. Ecological evidence supported reassessing the conservation status of R. alatus, enabling discussions on regulated sustainable use. To address seasonal income losses, we developed a community-based pequi processing initiative that aligns livelihood activities with ecological cycles. Over two decades, sustained collaboration, co-produced knowledge and livelihood diversification reduced conflict, strengthened local organization and supported adaptive management under legal uncertainty. This demonstrates that long-term participatory processes can sustain conservation outcomes and reconcile biodiversity conservation with rural livelihoods in socially and biologically diverse landscapes.

Conservation agriculture (CA), based on minimum soil disturbance, crop residue retention, and crop diversification, is promoted as a climate-smart approach to improve smallholder farmers’ resilience amid increasing climate change-related shocks and soil degradation in sub-Saharan Africa. However, CA adoption remains low, and literature on CA profit efficiency is scanty. This study assesses the profitability and profit efficiency of conventional tillage-based agriculture (CT) and CA practices in Zambia. Using a three-wave annual panel dataset of 1,938 household-level observations across contrasting farmer typologies, we apply panel stochastic frontier analysis and a panel tobit model to analyze profit efficiency and identify determinants of efficiency levels. Results show that CA practices, especially minimum tillage with crop rotation, had higher gross margins but lower profit efficiency, with inefficiencies of up to 27.78% for minimum tillage with crop rotation compared to 18.70% for CT. Principal component analysis identified three farmer typologies: asset- and income-poor, asset- and income-rich, and asset- and income-moderate. Notably, asset- and income-rich farmers achieved the highest profit efficiency under CT and full CA (minimum tillage with crop rotation and mulching), while asset- and income-poor farmers achieved the highest efficiency under minimum tillage, minimum tillage with crop rotation, and minimum tillage with mulching. Input costs (notably fertilizer and labor), maize prices, and farmer characteristics such as education, household size, and cooperative membership significantly influenced profit efficiency. The findings underscore the need for context-specific CA promotion, tailored to farmer typologies.

The glaciers of High Mountain Asia, a region which is known as “Asian Water Tower,” supply vital water resources to downstream dryland cities across several countries. Climate change threatens this region by accelerating glacier retreat and altering the timing, quantity, quality and variability of meltwater supply. This article examines how these changes affect water security across glacier-fed river basins and downstream dryland cities. We find that enhanced melt may temporarily augment water availability, but it also heightens the risks of flooding and glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) and may encourage socioeconomic development and water demand that become unsustainable after “peak water.” Continued glacier shrinkage will ultimately reduce runoff and threaten long-term water security. Much existing infrastructure and many water governance arrangements were designed using historical records of rainfall, snowfall, ice thickness, runoff timing and peak discharge hydrographs. As these baselines change, design thresholds, reservoir operations and water allocation rules need to be updated using new observations and basin-specific projections. These changes pose particular challenges for dryland cities, where inefficiencies in irrigation systems and limited reservoir regulation constrain the capacity to manage increasingly variable glacier runoff. To address these interconnected challenges, we propose an integrated basin management framework that combines legally and environmentally feasible glacier protection, meltwater storage and seasonal water regulation in upstream areas; ecosystem restoration, carbon sequestration and water retention in midstream areas; and improved water use efficiency, allocation and risk management in downstream cities. Implementation requires transparent monitoring and careful assessment of the environmental, technical, financial, legal and social trade-offs associated with different interventions.

Applying a Science and Technology Studies (STS) lens and building on Rancièrian philosophy and the aesthetic turn in International Relations (IR), the article explores the possibilities that the mobilisation of knowledge from the artistic field holds for the pluralisation of expert knowledge-making in the global governance of sustainable development. Is the use of aesthetic knowledge production yet another effort to ‘art-wash’ a global governance agenda? Or does the opening of such new spaces of political exchange create the opportunity for collective knowledge production and political transformation? Moving beyond examining art as an instrument of science communication, the article discusses artworks as boundary objects, facilitating multivocality, interpretative flexibility, inclusivity, timeliness, and virtual reality, all achieved within the technocratic environment of a governing agenda where datafied expertise continues to dominate. Following such ‘new modalities of reflection’,1 the article applies case study analysis of artworks exhibited at UN COP meetings in order to explore the dynamic interdependence of policy and art as spaces of expert knowledge production and democratic politics.

This article examines the effectiveness of individual transferable quotas (ITQs) in promoting sustainable resource management within an overlapping generations economy where agricultural producers face credit constraints. The analysis shows that, although ITQs restore the social optimum when markets are complete, their effectiveness breaks down when credit constraints bind. Credit frictions create a wedge between the marginal product of the resource and its effective price, leading constrained agents to underinvest in quotas and generating resource misallocation. As a result, ITQs alone are insufficient to ensure environmental preservation without compromising welfare. The study therefore shows that policies improving credit access, such as loan guarantees, are necessary complements to ITQ systems if sustainable resource management is to be achieved.

This article examines the Sustainability Omnibus as a potential turning point in EU lawmaking through the lens of the emerging principle of non-regression in environmental law. It argues that the Omnibus not only amends the central pillars of the EU sustainability framework but also reflects a shift in how such reforms are adopted. Substantively, the Omnibus narrows the scope of reporting and due diligence obligations and weakens elements of the disclosure and enforcement architecture, lowering the level of environmental and human rights protection envisaged in the CSRD and the CS3D. At the same time, its preparation departed from core safeguards of EU better regulation, including the absence of a dedicated impact assessment, limited public consultation and reliance on a broad notion of urgency. The article uses non-regression as an analytical framework to assess both these substantive and procedural issues. It argues that, while non-regression has not yet crystallised into a binding principle of EU law, it is best understood as establishing a presumption against backsliding that triggers a heightened duty of justification. It concludes that in the EU context, this presumption should operate primarily ex ante, requiring stricter standards of evidence, transparency, participation and reasoning where environmental protection is reduced.

Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS), established to preserve and promote interdisciplinary research on traditional knowledge, have been increasingly discussed in relation to diversity, nationalism, and the integration of traditional knowledge with modern science. A recent article in this journal argues that IKS exhibits a Vedic Hindu-centric bias, marginalizing various knowledge traditions and fostering pseudoscience. This article discusses IKS from historical, demographic, institutional, and research perspectives, focusing on its origins, civilizational diversity, early studies of traditional knowledge, and funded projects. We observed that traditional knowledge research in India predated IKS, with support from multiple agencies. However, IKS, under a single institutional structure, provides a more structured ecosystem aimed at greater visibility, coordinated funding, innovation, and scientific validation. Such scholarship demonstrates the inherent plurality of the Indian civilization, which established a continuum of orthodox and heterodox philosophical schools, Buddhist and Jain systems, Islamic scholarship, indigenous communities, and regional practices. In our analysis of 102 IKS-funded projects, nearly 50 percent of the projects were aimed at scientific validation across health-related sciences (19.61%), agriculture and sustainability (14.71%), and materials science, metallurgy, and heritage engineering (13.73%). These priorities are aligned with contemporary national and global research agendas, including One Health, preventive healthcare, climate resilience, and digital technologies.

For millennia, Indigenous fisher-hunter-gatherer populations across the globe have navigated the complexities and sensitivities of estuarine ecosystems, leaving robust archaeological and ecological records of long-term, adaptive histories anchored by complex political, economic, and social forms. Regarding the broad, interdisciplinary literature of hunter-gatherer studies, archaeologists in particular have begun to address the undertheorized category of overtly sedentary hunter-gatherer communities and the ways that these societies were able to grow and persist sustainably. This research builds on recent studies investigating the long-term impacts of humans in estuarine environments, contributing a critical, small-scale perspective that expands and complements more recent regional approaches. In doing so, this study presents the largest analysis via the archaeological record of oyster resource management practices at a single Native American village yet to be conducted to evaluate community-scale sustainability among sedentary fisher-hunter-gatherers. More specifically, it investigates the growth of one of the largest Ancestral Muskogean towns to have existed along the Atlantic coast—on Ossabaw Island, Georgia—and the ways that people managed shellfisheries in the face of growing demographic pressures on both local ecologies and social, political, and economic institutions. Leveraging absolute chronologies and a shellfish morphometric dataset from two dozen domestic middens, sustainable resource management practices are evaluated across a single community’s history.

Empirical evidence suggests that decoupling economic growth from greenhouse gases is impossible, thus requiring zero growth. What principles of distributive justice does a zero-growth economy call for? This article focuses on two distribuenda in a zero-growth economy. We argue that firm limits both on income inequalities and on individual emissions are required by justice. Concerning income, we argue that its distribution in a zero-growth economy should respect a suitably reinterpreted version of John Rawls’s difference principle. As to emission rights, contrary to the conventional wisdom that is insensitive to who reduces their emissions, we call for individual emission caps.

After COVID-19 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, many countries levied windfall taxes on specific sectors that obtained abnormal levels of profitability (e.g. banking, energy, food distribution). Windfall taxation is evolving from the traditional taxing of unearned profit due to luck (i.e. extraordinary profit due to interest rate rise) to taxing profits derived from unsustainable practices (i.e. profit-shifting in Pillar Two). Such a shift reveals the profound crisis of corporate income tax on tax business profit and places windfall taxation as an interim solution to collect tax revenue. This need to collect revenue complicates and renders incoherent the legal design of windfall taxes (in-scope rules, taxable base and tax rate) under the ability to pay and equality principle. To prevent creating a tax on general income, the legislator struggles to single out the industries subject to the tax, calculate the taxable base (extraordinary profit) and determine a tax rate. Such tensions reveal the difficulties of drawing lines in taxing business profits and suggest the need for a fully fledged reform of corporate taxation.

How was the Expo 2025 in Osaka spun and marketed to the public vis-à-vis the news media discourse? We focus on the issues of power play, politics, scandals, imaginaries, nostalgia, and sustainability, adding a comparative angle with the Tokyo 2020/2021 Olympics. While mega-events globally have similar features, some are particular to Japanese mega-events: in the ways they become a crystallization of utopian cosmopolitan imaginaries of a peaceful global society with Japan as its benevolent retainer, and in how they serve as an arena for domestic nostalgia-politics that attempts to relive the postwar glory days for the aging political-industrial elites.

Normative theories often fail when applied to future generations, creating counterintuitive results in climate change policy. This paper explores these challenges to explain why many sophisticated arguments initially seem implausible. It divides normative ethics into consequentialist and deontological approaches, showing how both schools struggle to provide a coherent framework for intergenerational justice and climate change.

Addressing the health and welfare challenges that working donkeys face requires a multidimensional, stakeholder-engaged approach. Stakeholders presumed to play a role in the health and welfare of working donkeys were identified through snowball sampling. Focus group discussions (FGDs) and key informant interviews (KIIs) were used to collect qualitative data via unstructured questionnaires to determine linkages, roles, interests, and influences via pairwise ranking, stakeholders’ centrality analysis, and visualisation using NodeXL Basic. The study revealed that 20 stakeholders were involved in providing health and welfare for working donkeys due to their positions and influence in decision-making. Donkey owners and users (0.84), local Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) (0.68), Government Department of Veterinary Services (0.42), academic institutions (0.37), and International Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) (0.37) were the key stakeholders based on degree centrality. Interactions among the stakeholders were high, as indicated by the average closeness centrality. The users and the local NGO were the gatekeepers to information based on betweenness centrality. Interactions and relationships among stakeholders have a powerful influence on working donkeys and can serve as a foundation for continued engagement through the sharing of perspectives, experiences, and opinions. The need to mainstream donkey health and welfare among other domestic animals in policy development and resource allocation for service delivery is critical. This holistic approach will not only promote the health and welfare of working donkeys and their owners who depend on them for income generation to support their livelihoods but also ensure the long-term viability of the donkeys as a source of employment.