Prajal Pradhan

University of Groningen | RUG · Energy and Sustainability Research Institute Groningen (ESRIG)

Identifying research gaps and priorities is paramount to advance sustainability science and contribute to a sustainable future. This editorial contributes to this effort by contemplating the sustainability science research agenda and aligning it with recent changes in global dynamics. Drawing on consultations with the editorial board members of the...

The integrated and indivisible nature of the SDGs is facing implementation challenges due to the silo approaches. We present the three interconnected foci (SDG interactions, modeling, and tools) at the science-policy interface to address these challenges. Accounting for them will support accelerated SDG progress, operationalizing the integration an...

The many complex interconnections among countries driven by natural and socioeconomic processes have a crucial impact on regional and global sustainability, yet a robust and systematic way to quantify this impact is lacking. Here we introduce two complementary approaches to bridge this key methodological gap. The first entails constructing a new su...

The iron and steel (IAS) sector forms a critical foundation of the global economy, and the successful eco-economic decoupling of this sector has been a focus of academic inquiry. However, existing literature in decoupling analysis often adopts a "carbon tunnel vision," that is, concentrating on carbon alone while neglecting a broader array of envir...

Urban rooftop agriculture (RA) and photovoltaic power production (RPV) offer sustainable solutions for the food–energy nexus in cities but compete for limited rooftop space. Here we explore the potential benefits (productivity, economic and environmental) and allocation strategy of RA and RPV across 13 million buildings in 124 Chinese cities, consi...

The livestock sector represents major challenges to safeguarding environmental integrity. This study comprehensively analyzes ten environmental footprints of the livestock sector from 1995 to 2022, with projections until 2030, and juxtaposes them with the planetary boundaries. We quantify greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water use, particulate m...

Urban agriculture can contribute to sustainable development. However, a holistic investigation is lacking to comprehend its positive and negative impacts on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Our systematic analysis of around 1,450 relevant publications on urban agriculture, screened from 76,000 records, fills this gap. We map and analyze th...

Waste biomass is mainly used conventionally, without being converted into valuable products in developing countries, e.g., Nepal, mainly due to a lack of proper conversion knowledge, infrastructure, and resource data. We assessed the amount of biomass at sub-national (geography, province, and district) levels in Nepal to explore its conversion poss...

Sustainable development depends on the integration of the economy, society, and environment. Yet, escalating environmental challenges pose threats to both society and the economy. Despite progress in addressing environmental issues to promote sustainability, knowledge gaps in scientific research, technological advancement, engineering practice, and...

The SDG targets related to food and land systems are particularly off-track. The SDR evaluates three possible pathways towards achieving sustainable food and land systems. Globally, 600 million people will still suffer from hunger by 2030; obesity is increasing; and greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, forestry, and other land use (AFOLU) acc...

"There are no scientifically justified obstacles to protecting biodiversity in all its beauty and diversity. There are only six years left to achieve the biodiversity targets by 2030. We must work together now to get there in time." In the 10 Must Knows from Biodiversity Science 2024, 64 scientists have further developed their well-founded and div...

Accelerating efforts for the Sustainable Development Goals requires understanding their synergies and trade-offs at the national and sub-national levels, which will help identify the key hurdles and opportunities to prioritize them in an indivisible manner for a country. Here, we present the importance of the 17 goals through synergy and trade-off...

Urban rooftop agriculture (RA) and photovoltaics (RPV) offer sustainable solutions for energy-food systems in cities but compete for limited rooftop space. We explore the potential benefits (provisioning, economic, and environmental) and allocation strategy of RA and RPV across 13 million buildings in 124 Chinese cities, considering building height...

Biogas plays a significant part in replacing solid biomass and fossil fuels for cooking. However, the implementation of appropriate policies to promote the development of biogas plants is hindered by a lack of adequate assessment of the biogas potential in Nepal. Thus, we estimate the potential of biogas production at the district level of Nepal fr...

Leave No One Behind (LNOB) is a core tenet of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. It is an endeavour to reach those groups of people who are the “furthest behind” concerning all the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Nepal has been in the forefront of its commitment to SDGs. While numerous challenges exist, there have also been opport...

Countries are not on track to achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, comprising 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Rescuing the 2030 Agenda requires prioritizing SDGs based on an understanding of complex SDG interactions. Many methods are used to unentangle SDG interactions, from literature reviews to modelling. Among these meth...

Global climate change is a major threat to the sustainability of the agricultural sector. As a result of climate-related extreme events, food insecurity is steadily increasing worldwide. Food insecurity was higher among agricultural households (especially smallholder farmers) than among non-agricultural households. Smallholder farmers are particula...

In 2015, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly agreed on 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with 169 targets as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Although the SDGs, which are to be achieved by 2030, are not the first attempt to guide policy actors through global goals, they go far beyond earlier agreements in their detail...

Extensive efforts have been dedicated to deciphering the interactions associated with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, these developments are hampered by a lack of efficient strategies to avoid beneficial synergies being offset by harmful trade-offs. To fill these gaps, we used causal diagnosis and network analysis methods to construc...

We investigate the impacts of a global crisis to trade systems such as the Russia-Ukraine war on agricultural emissions, using two emissions accounting approaches: (1) the production-based approach, which only accounts for domestic emissions, and (2) the trade-adjustment approach, which considers imports and exports when calculating emissions. We f...

Nepal is one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change, which is negatively affecting agricultural production and food security. However, the role of agro-ecological zones and social groups in climate change adaptation (CCA) and its impact on smallholder farmers in Nepal remains unexplored. To fill this gap, this study aimed to identify th...

Rescuing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from failing requires understanding their interactions networks, i.e., synergies and trade-offs, at national and especially sub-national levels, where SDGs were delivered. This understanding will help itendifying the key hurdles and opportunities to prioritize the 17 SDGs in a indivisible manner for a c...

Urban agriculture, including peri-urban farming, can nourish around one billion city dwellers and provide multiple social, economic, and environmental benefits. However, these benefits depend on various factors and are debated. Therefore, we used machine learning to semi-automate a systematic review of the existing literature on urban agriculture....

Globally, deforestation produces anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, contributing substantially to climate change. Forest cover changes also have large impacts on ecosystem services. Deforestation is the dominant type of land cover change in tropical regions, and this land cover change relates to distinct causes recognized as direct defor...

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...

The livestock sector represents major challenges to safeguarding environmental integrity. Therefore, we comprehensively analyze twelve environmental impacts of the livestock sector from 1995 to 2016 and project them until 2030. Our findings show livestock production impacts land resources, freshwater use, energy demand, climate change, nitrogen and...

Life cycle assessment reveals that the emissions from the treatment and disposal of lost and wasted food account for around half of greenhouse gas emissions from food systems. Therefore, saving food is essential to reduce food systems’ environmental impacts.

Rescuing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development from failing requires prioritizing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), understanding the impacts of underachieving SDGs, and building a post-2030 Agenda based on scientific evidence.

Climate change affects the functioning of all of the components of food systems, often in ways that exacerbate existing predicaments and inequalities among regions of the world and groups in society. At the same time, food systems are a major cause of climate change, accounting for a third of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Therefore, food syst...

A pervasive trend in economic development is the shift from agricultural to manufacturing and finally to service economies. Because the type of employment associated with each sector influences natural resource use this global trend may manifest itself in predictable land use transitions. We relate these to changes in urban, agricultural, and natur...

Agriculture is a major sector responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. Local food production can contribute to reducing transport-related emissions. Since most of the worldwide population lives in cities, locally producing food implies practicing agriculture in urban and peri-urban areas. Exemplary, we analyze the potential to produce fresh vegeta...

This paper discusses severe risks to food security and nutrition that are linked to ongoing and projected climate change, particularly climate and weather extremes in global warming, drought, flooding, and precipitation. We specifically consider the impacts on populations vulnerable to food insecurity and malnutrition due to lower income, lower acc...

The Andean-Amazon foothills region, one of the richest biodiversity ecoregions on earth, is threatened by climate change combined with unsustainable agricultural and extensive livestock farming. These land-use practices tend to reduce the diversification of rural farming, decreasing households’ livelihood alternatives and rendering them more vulner...

The Andean-Amazon foothills region, one of the richest biodiversity ecoregions on earth, is threatened by climate change combined with unsustainable agricultural and extensive livestock farming. These land-use practices tend to reduce the diversification of rural farming, decreasing households' livelihood alternatives and rendering them more vulner...

Agriculture in India accounts for 18% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and uses significant land and water. Various socioeconomic factors and food subsidies influence diets in India. Indian food systems face the challenge of sustainably nourishing the 1.3 billion population. However, existing studies focus on a few food system components, and holi...

This chapter provides an overview of the multi-faceted landscape of methods used to study the steering effects of the Sustainable Development Goals. After a discussion of the political use of science and the complex relations between science and politics, the chapter showcases a selection of different methods that are employed to trace the steering...

With global warming, many climate extremes are becoming more frequent, often co-occurring, or repeatedly occurring in consecutive years. However, only limited studies have investigated these changes of climate extremes together. We study these changes in Europe for the last seven decades (1950–2019) based on 39 climate indices to identify climate e...

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted by the United Nations in 2015 as part of the "2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development" and aim to address issues ranging from poverty and economic growth to climate change. Efforts to tackle one issue can support or hinder progress towards others, often with complex systemic interactions. Thus,...

Written by an international team of over sixty experts and drawing on over three thousand scientific studies, this is the first comprehensive global assessment of the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals, which were launched by the United Nations in 2015. It explores in detail the political steering effects of the Sustainable Devel...

In 2015, the United Nations agreed on 17 Sustainable Development Goals as the central normative framework for sustainable development worldwide. The effectiveness of governing by such broad global goals, however, remains uncertain, and we lack comprehensive meta-studies that assess the political impact of the goals across countries and globally. We...

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions in food systems is becoming more challenging as food is increasingly consumed away from producer regions, highlighting the need to consider emissions embodied in trade in agricultural emissions accounting. To address this, our study explores recent trends in trade-adjusted agricultural emissions of food items at th...

Trade enables food access and is therefore key to achieving global food security. However, greenhouse gas emissions associated with food transport are many times higher than what was indicated by previous estimates.

The 2020s are an essential decade for achieving the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). For this, SDG research needs to provide evidence that can be translated into concrete actions. However, studies use different SDG data, resulting in incomparable findings. Researchers primarily use SDG databases provided by the United Natio...

The nexus approach offers an important heuristic tool for the sustainable management of resources by considering the links among different sectors. The food-energy-water (FEW) nexus corresponds to links among the three of seventeen United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), namely SDG2 (No Hungry), SDG6 (Clean Water and Sanitation), and S...

Sustainability initiatives, such as Repair Cafes, are sites of niche innovations with the potential to contribute to an urban sustainability transition. Using the multi-level perspective as a framework, we explore the visions of change of 12 Repair Cafes in Berlin to understand how the members believe the movement can effect change. We explore the...

Understanding the interactions (synergies and trade-offs) among the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is crucial for enhancing policy coherence between different sectors. However, spatial differences in the SDG interactions and their temporal variations at the sub-national scale are still critical gaps that need to be urgently filled. Here, we a...

Our current food systems not only fail to end malnourishment, but also exhibit substantial ecological impacts. Thus they are an obstacle to achieving numerous Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Our authors have a look at the context and explain how these negative impacts can be converted into positive ones.

Renewable energies, such as solar and wind energy, play a critical role in achieving rapid decarbonization to limit global warming by replacing fossil energy. However, lack of knowledge on renewable energy potentials in developing countries is a barrier in making adequate policies to promote these energies. Thus, we have carried out a spatial and e...

“It is surely our responsibility to do everything within our power to create a planet that provides a home not just for us, but for all life on Earth”—Sir David Attenborough, BBC Planet Earth II, 2016.

The COVID‐19 pandemic has impacted social, economic, and environmental systems worldwide, slowing down and reversing the progress made in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). SDGs belong to the 2030 Agenda to transform our world by tackling humankind's challenges to ensure well‐being, economic prosperity, and environmental protection...

Previous research has identified a predictive model of how a nation’s distribution of gross domestic product (GDP) among agriculture (a), industry (i), and services (s) changes as a country develops. Here we use this national model to analyze the composition of GDP for US Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA) over time. To characterize the transfer...

This file consists of the processed data of the paper Pradhan et al. 2021 published in the Earth's Future (https://doi.org/10.1029/2021EF001996). We processed impact scores and mechanisms provided by experts during online survey, workshops, and review and validation processes. This processed data, i.e., impact scores and mechanisms, are used for id...

Fod Systems Summit Brief Prepared by Research Partners of the Scientific Group for the Food Systems Summit, May 2021

The impacts of climate change are projected to become more intense and frequent. One of the indirect impacts of climate change is food insecurity. Agriculture in Pakistan, measured fourth best in the world, is already experiencing visible adverse impacts of climate change. Among many other food sources, potato crop remains one of the food security...

Trade is appreciated as a powerful path toward economic growth and poverty alleviation. However, it can also provide a loophole that displaces emissions and climate mitigation. This Voices asks, where are the opportunities to close the carbon loophole and facilitate sustainable and fair trade?

Child malnutrition is indisputably a multi-faceted phenomenon. Comprehending the aforesaid crucial issue this paper intended to identify climatic and non-climatic factors for the spatial variation of malnutrition prevalence in Bangladesh. The climatic data on temperature and rainfall are obtained from the WorldClim dataset. We obtained a set of glo...

Agriculture is greatly impacted by climate change, which can lead to situations of food security or insecurity at both regional and global levels. Pakistan is predicted to experience an area reduction and geographical shifting of major crops in the near future. In the present study, we assessed the potential future distribution of wheat and maize i...

This supporting information consists of two figures and one tables. Figure S1. Experts with various professional backgrounds from academia, civil society organizations, governments, grassroots initiatives, national and international organizations, and the private sector have participated in our survey (left) and workshops (right). Figure S2. Impa...

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected humankind worldwide, slowing down and even reversing the progress made in achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It has negatively impacted most SDGs but with positive impacts on a few. We discuss some initial impacts observed and explores potential impacts on the achievement of SDGs for Nepal. The study...

Climate change is threatening the livelihood of tea farmers in Nepal. Simultaneously, the production of tea is becoming an increasingly important economic sector for the country. This study aimed to reveal the adaptation behavior towards climate change among smallholder tea farmers, particularly which demographic, institutional, and information sou...

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...

The nutrition transition transforms food systems globally and shapes public health and environmental change. Here we provide a global forward-looking assessment of a continued nutrition transition and its interlinked symptoms in respect to food consumption. These symptoms range from underweight and unbalanced diets to obesity, food waste and enviro...

To fulfill the 2030 Agenda, the complexity of sustainable development goal (SDG) interactions needs to be disentangled. However, this understanding is currently limited. We conduct a cross‐sectional correlational analysis for 2016 to understand SDG interactions under the entire development spectrum. We apply several correlation methods to classify...

The Andean-Amazon foothills region, shaped by Andean moist forests and Amazon forests in southwestern Colombia, Napo province in Ecuador, and Ucayali Province and Napo Basin in Peru, provides local and global ecosystem services as food, water, world climate regulation, water purification, and carbon absorption. However, it faces major problems of l...

Cities will play a key role in the grand challenge of nourishing a growing global population, because, due to their population density, they set the demand. To ensure that food systems are sustainable as well as nourishing, one solution often suggested is to shorten their supply chains towards a regional rather than a global basis. Whilst such regi...

The crucial link between agricultural growth and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set by the United Nations Development Programme is established through efficient use of nitrogen in the cereal production systems. Nitrogen, mostly in its reactive form as fertilizer or synthetic N, governs the food production, and reconciles the productivity...

India is facing a double burden of malnourishment with co-existences of under- and over-nourishment. Various socioeconomic factors play an essential role in determining dietary choices. Agriculture is one of the major emitters of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in India, contributing 18% of total emissions. It also consumes freshwater and uses land signifi...

Future technologies and systemic innovation are critical for the profound transformation the food system needs. These innovations range from food production, land use and emissions, all the way to improved diets and waste management. Here, we identify these technologies, assess their readiness and propose eight action points that could accelerate t...

The world is facing a triple burden of undernourishment, obesity, and environmental impacts from agriculture while nourishing its population. This burden makes sustainable nourishment of the growing population a global challenge. Addressing this challenge requires an understanding of the interplay between diets, health, and associated environmental...

Most South Asian countries have challenges in ensuring water, energy, and food (WEF) security, which are often interacting positively or negatively. To address these challenges, the nexus approach provides a framework to identify the interactions of the WEF sectors as an integrated system. However, most nexus studies only qualitatively discuss the...