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The mitigation of climate change requires a fundamental transition of the energy system. Affordability, reliability and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions constitute central but often conflicting targets for this energy transition.…
A successful response to climate change needs vast investments in low-carbon research, energy, and sustainable development. Governments can drive research, provide environmental regulation, and accelerate global development, but the…
Anthropogenic emissions of CO2 must soon approach net-zero to stabilize the global mean temperature. Although several international agreements have advocated for coordinated climate actions, their implementation has remained below…
In the last 150 years, CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has increased from 280 parts per million to 400 parts per million. This has caused an increase in the average global temperatures by nearly 0.7 degree centigrade due to the…
The dynamics of epidemics depend on how people's behavior changes during an outbreak. At the beginning of the epidemic, people do not know about the virus, then, after the outbreak of epidemics and alarm, they begin to comply with the…
We study the mitigation of climate tipping point transitions using an energy balance model. The evolution of the global mean surface temperature is coupled with the CO2 concentration through the green house effect. We model the CO2…
An array system of coupled maps is proposed as a model for economy evolution. The local dynamics of each map or agent is controlled by two parameters. One of them represents the growth capacity of the agent and the other one is a control…
Humankind has spread worldwide supported by cultural and technological knowledge, but the environmental sustainability on the human niche evolution depends on a new human beings relationship with the biosphere. Human lifestyles nowadays are…
Global sustainability relies on our capacity of understanding and guiding urban systems, and their metabolism, in an adequate way. It has been proposed that bigger and denser cities are more resource-efficient than smaller ones because they…
The scientific data about the state of our planet, presented at the 2012 (Rio+20) summit, documented that today's human family lives even less sustainably than it did in 1992. The data indicate furthermore that the environmental impacts…
With a steadily growing human population and rapid advancements in technology, the global human network is increasing in size and connection density. This growth exacerbates networked global threats and can lead to unexpected consequences…
Growth of the world population and the world economic growth were hyperbolic in the past 2,000,000 years. Recently, from around 1950, they started to be diverted to slower trajectories but they are still close to the historical hyperbolic…
A transition to a fully global renewable energy infrastructure is potentially possible in no more than a few decades, even using current wind/solar technologies. We demonstrate that at its completion this transition would terminate…
Using observational data and an elementary rigorous statistical fact it is easily shown that the distribution of Earth's climate is non-stationary. Examination of records of hundreds of local Industrial Era temperature histories in the…
Analysis of the urban population fraction data for sixteen populous countries over the last fifty years reveals a universal increase in urbanization, exhibiting four qualitatively distinct temporal patterns: (i) continuously accelerating…
Combining global gridded population and fossil fuel based CO2 emission data at 1km scale, we investigate the spatial origin of CO2 emissions in relation to the population distribution within countries. We depict the correlations between…
We introduce the logistic model of consumption growth, which captures a negative feedback loop preventing an unlimited growth of consumption due to finite biophysical resources of our planet. This simple dynamic model allows for derivation…
The processes and mechanisms underlying the origin and maintenance of biological diversity have long been of central importance in ecology and evolution. The competitive exclusion principle states that the number of coexisting species is…
Using the economic complexity methodology on data for disease prevalence in 195 countries during the period of 1990-2016, we propose two new metrics for quantifying the relatedness between diseases, or the `disease space' of countries. With…
The co-evolution of economic and ecological activities represents one of the fundamental challenges in the realm of sustainable development. This study on the word trends in mainstream newspapers from the UK and China reveals that both…