Brett A. Bryan

Deakin University · School of Life and Environmental Sciences

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) encompass environmental, social, and economic dimensions which are linked to the characteristics of place and have a strong local dimension. They are interconnected at local scales in complex ways which makes progress toward them difficult to predict. To understand how these interconnections play out at t...

Estimating the health burden of air pollution against the background of population aging is of great significance for achieving the Sustainable Development Goal 3.9 which aims to substantially reduce the deaths and illnesses from air pollution. Here, we estimated spatiotemporal changes in deaths attributable to PM2.5 air pollution in China from 200...

While dietary transitions offer benefits for both people and the environment globally, uncertainties persist regarding their impacts on the environment, human health, and food affordability across countries and over time. Here, we project water use, dietary quality, and food affordability from 2020–2100 under four healthy dietary scenarios and a ba...

COVID-19 pandemic responses have brought unprecedented challenges to the United Nations 2030 Agenda for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and a quantitative, multi-dimensional assessment of the impacts of these responses on SDG progress is required. Here, we use an adaptive multi-regional input–output model to quantitatively assess the impac...

Sustainability science is a discipline which is strongly concerned with exploring the achievement of sustainable futures. One way in which this is done is through scenarios. The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), developed for climate science, have been widely adopted by modellers to analyse sustainable futures. We question whether the SSPs are...

Water data are essential for monitoring, managing, modelling and projecting water resources. Yet despite such data—including water quantity, quality, demand and ecology—being extensively collected in China, it remains difficult to access, use and share them. These challenges have led to poor data quality, duplication of effort and wasting of resour...

Transforming the global food system is necessary to avoid exceeding planetary boundaries. A robust evidence base is crucial to assess the scale and combination of interventions required for a sustainable transformation. We developed a risk assessment framework, underpinned by a meta-regression of 60 global food system modeling studies, to quantify...

We developed a machine learning based surrogate model to identify sustainability pathways through rapid scenario generation and defined the safe operating space for achieving them via scenario discovery. We trained a surrogate model to replicate the Land‐Use Trade‐Offs integrated model of the Australian land system. Latin hypercube sampling was use...

Agricultural and livestock production involves significant trade-offs between multiple sustainable development goals, including reducing hunger and poverty, and reducing emissions of greenhouse gasses. Here we describe a multi-objective optimization tool for livestock production to evaluate trade-offs among environmental and economic objectives wit...

Monitoring progress towards key social and economic goals requires a comprehensive understanding of the social, cultural, and economic aspects of sustainability and the indicators available to track their performance. Through a systematic review of 84 studies focusing on socioeconomic indicators of human development, we compiled a comprehensive dat...

Sustainable food systems require malnutrition and climate change to be addressed in parallel. Here, we estimate the non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions resulting from closing the world’s dietary nutrient gap—that between country-level nutrient supply and population requirements—for energy, protein, iron, zinc, vitamin A, vitamin B12 and folate under f...

Decision-making under uncertainty is important for managing human-natural systems in a changing world. A major source of uncertainty that challenges decisions is rooted in their multi-actor settings, i.e., the poorly understood societal actors with diverse values, complex relationships, and conflicting management approaches. Despite general agreeme...

Ending poverty in all its forms everywhere is the first global goal of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Poverty eradication is a long-term process that faces many uncertainties and complex interactions with other Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In order to better understand poverty and contribute to addressing pover...

Adaptation to climatic change in smallholder agriculture is pivotal to ensuring food security in many developing countries. Research into adaptation to climate change in smallholder agriculture has often used capital-based indicator frameworks, with only limited consideration of the cognitive dimensions influencing adaptation motivation. In this st...

Accurate predictions of land-use change are important for supporting planning. Cellular automata (CA) models are widely used to simulate real-world urban land-use change but accurately modeling complex spatial urban patterns and dynamics can be challenging due to the high degree of subjectivity involved in CA model parameterisation. Advances in dee...

Lakes are important natural resources and carbon gas emitters and are undergoing rapid changes worldwide in response to climate change and human activities. A detailed global characterization of lakes and their long-term dynamics does not exist, which is however crucial for evaluating the associated impacts on water availability and carbon emission...

Understanding how agri-food consumption by individual countries contributes to their own water stress and that of other agri-food producer countries, and identifying opportunities to help reduce global water stress is important for ensuring responsible agri-food consumption and production. Assessing 26 agri-food commodities traded between 189 count...

Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is contingent on managing complex interactions that create synergies and trade‐offs between different goals. It is, therefore, important to improve our understanding of them, their underlying causal drivers, future behaviors, and policy implications. Prominent methods of interaction analysis that f...

The development of detailed national pathways towards sustainable food and land systems aims to provide stakeholders with clarity on how long-term goals could be achieved and to reduce roadblocks in the way to making commitments. However, the inability to perfectly capture the relationships between all variables in a system and the unknown probabil...

Cellular automata models are popular tools for exploring future land change pathways. But simulation modelling approaches often focus too narrowly on calibration against historic reference maps, limiting the diversity of possible outcomes. We argue that, contrary to what is commonly believed, there is no ‘best model’, and that model specification a...

Progress to date toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has fallen short of expectations and is unlikely to fully meet 2030 targets. Past assessments have mostly focused on short- and medium-term evaluations, thus limiting the ability to explore the longer-term effects of systemic interactions with time lags and delay. Here we undertake gl...

Lake ice loss has been detected worldwide due to recent climate warming, yet spatially and temporally detailed information on the changes inglobal ice phenology does not exist. Here, we build a global lake ice phenologydatabase comprising three lake ice phenologies –freeze-up, break-up, and ice duration –for each year acrosstwocenturies (1900-2099)...

Adaptation to climate change is imperative for the resilience of smallholder agriculture in many developing countries. While studies have focused on climatic impacts on crops and adaptation decisions, barriers to the uptake of adaptation measures by smallholder farmers remain largely unexplored. We empirically quantified the adoption of adaptation...

Climate change is transforming the decision-making landscape for many conservation organizations. Conservation planning and implementation under climate change are challenging due to uncertainties about climate impacts and the effectiveness of adaptation options. Strategically building flexibility into conservation plans so they can be adjusted ove...

Estimating the health burden of air pollution in China against the background of population aging is of great significance for the well-being of elderly individuals and achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Since previous studies did not fully consider the differences on drivers of deaths attributable to PM 2.5 pollutio...

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) encompass environmental, social, and economic dimensions which are linked to the characteristics of place and have a strong local dimension. They are interconnected at local scales in complex ways which makes progress difficult to predict. To understand how these interconnections play out at the local sca...

Non-technical summary Models are increasingly used to inform the transformation of human–Earth systems towards a sustainable future, aligned with the sustainable development goals (SDGs). We argue that a greater diversity of models ought to be used for sustainability analysis to better address complexity and uncertainty. We articulate the steps to...

Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is contingent on managing complex interactions that create synergies and trade-offs between different goals. Given the importance of interactions, it is necessary to understand the system mechanisms underpinning them to provide insight into their non-linear behaviours such as side-effects, delay, a...

Quantifying and mapping trans‐boundary ecosystem service (ES) flows can help identify dependencies and responsibilities for promoting economic development and environmental sustainability between nations, but few studies have focused on ES flows beyond national boundaries. Our case‐study region—Central Asia—hosts one of the largest dryland areas in...

Ending poverty in all its forms everywhere is the first goal being targeted by the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Poverty eradication is a long-term process that faces the challenges of many uncertainties and complex interactions with other Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In order to better understand poverty and cont...

The dataset presents the raw data collected through a household survey on adaptation to climatic variabilities and change by smallholder farmers in Sudurpaschim Pradesh (Far Western Province), Nepal. The dataset comprises farmers' responses on the likely determinants of adaptation decisions, actual uptake of adaptation measures, and the barriers to...

To achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), actions are required at all global, national, and local scales. To ensure coordination between scales, local actions need to be carefully planned to be aligned with global and national priorities. Local planning for sustainability must be adaptive and heterogeneous but also consist...

The United Nations 2030 Agenda brings a holistic and multi-sectoral view on sustainability via the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, a successful implementation of this agenda is contingent on understanding the multiple, complex interactions among SDGs, including both synergies and trade-offs, for informing planning for sustainability...

Non-timber forest products (NTFPs) are some of nature’s most important contributions to people in mountain regions and their provision is increasingly affected by climate change. Here, we identify the types of NTFPs and their contributions to people in the mountain communities of the Upper Madi Watershed of Nepal and describe how these are being im...

The theory-practice gap (TPG) is well known in the environmental realm, referring to disconnects between knowledge generated through scientific research and the needs, expectations, and practices of knowledge users for environmental decision-making and practice. While the presence of the TPG is well established, we have yet to fully implement mecha...

Urbanization and climate change are together exacerbating water scarcity—where water demand exceeds availability—for the world’s cities. We quantify global urban water scarcity in 2016 and 2050 under four socioeconomic and climate change scenarios, and explored potential solutions. Here we show the global urban population facing water scarcity is p...

To sustain water-dependent economic and socio-ecological systems, natural capital and its interactions with other types of capital is gaining attention, but a clear understanding of how to manage natural capital sustainably and how to make decisions relevant to water-related ecosystem services is yet to be achieved. In this study, we extended the f...

Accurate, long time-series, high-resolution mapping of built-up land dynamics is essential for understanding urbanization and its environmental impacts. Despite advances in remote sensing and classification algorithms, built-up land mapping which only uses spectral data and derived indices remains prone to uncertainty. We mapped the extent of built...

The 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) represent a holistic and ambitious agenda for transforming the world towards societal well-being, economic prosperity, and environmental protection. Achieving the SDGs is, however, challenged by the performance of interconnected sectors and the complexity of their interactions which drive non-linear syste...

Non-timber forest products (NTFPs) contribute to the well-being of mountain communities in many ways but their availability is being impacted by climate change. Policy and programs to enhance adaptation can alleviate these impacts, but to be effective they require an understanding of mountain community perceptions of climate change impacts on NTFPs...

Abstract The achievement of global sustainability agendas, such as the Sustainable Development Goals, relies on transformational change across society, economy, and environment that are co‐created in a transdisciplinary exercise by all stakeholders. Within this context, environmental and societal change is increasingly understood and represented vi...

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) recognise the importance of action across all scales to achieve a sustainable future. To contribute to overall national- and global-scale SDG achievement, local communities need to focus on a locally-relevant subset of goals and understand potential future pathways for key drivers which influence local susta...

Global food trade enables the flow of dietary nutrients between countries. However, little is known about whether trade improves nutrient supply of countries most in need. Using detailed production and bilateral trade data, we found that despite strongly connected global nutrient networks, trade did not substantively improve the nutrient adequacy o...

Computational and data handling limitations have constrained time-series analyses of land-cover change at high-spatial resolution over large (e.g., continental) extents. However, a new set of cloud-computing services offer an opportunity for improving knowledge of land change at finer grain. We constructed a historical set of seven high-resolution...

Sustainable Development Goal 12 requires countries to achieve responsible consumption and production patterns without exceeding safe environmental limits for natural resource use. However, little is known about how cropland impacts from the agri-food sector contribute to the exceedance of national environmental limits for consumption and production...

While the need to reduce the impacts of pesticide use on the environment is increasingly acknowledged, the existing data on the use of agricultural chemicals are hardly adequate to support this goal. This study presents a novel, spatially explicit, national-scale baseline analysis of pesticide toxicity hazard (the potential for chemicals to do harm...

Background The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3.9 calls for the substantial reduction in deaths attributable to PM2.5 pollution (DAPP). However, future projections of DAPP in vary substantially, and the likelihood of meeting SDG3.9 depends on complex interactions between environmental, socio-economic, and healthcare parameters....

Sustainability planning is required to achieve sustainable development across the world at all scales. Such planning should be aligned with and grounded in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be comparable across scales, and use participatory techniques to understand local contexts. Planning for urban sustainability using the...

Food system innovations will be instrumental to achieving multiple Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, major innovation breakthroughs can trigger profound and disruptive changes, leading to simultaneous and interlinked reconfigurations of multiple parts of the global food system. The emergence of new technologies or social solutions, the...