Focus collections

Focus on Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
Guest Editors: Andreas Oschlies, Julia Pongratz, Sabine Fuss, Matthias Honegger, Matthias May, Nadine Mengis, Christine Merk, Gregor Rehder, Daniela Thrän, Martin Zimmer
Deadline: 31 May 2024
This collection aims to establish a solid science basis for decision-making concerning potentials, risks, and side-effects of the individual CDR methods and their potential co-application, but also concerning overarching questions of political and institutional feasibility, social acceptance, justice and ethics.

Focus on Atmospheric Remote Sensing and Environmental Change
Guest Editors: Zhengqiang Li, Jason Blake Cohen, Kai Qin, Jintai Lin, Zhe Jiang, Xiaomeng Jin
Deadline: 29 February 2024
This collection aims to bring together original research and reviews that use remotely sensed measurements of atmospheric composition or properties in connection with or impacting upon the environment and climate change.

Focus on Health-Centred Climate Solutions
Guest Editors: Wenjia Cai, Meghnath Dhimal, Ian Hamilton, Stella Hartinger, Chi Zhang, Ying Zhang
Deadline: 29 February 2024
This focus collection aims to deepen the understanding of climate-health linkages, emphasize the urgency of climate actions for health, and provide a collage of practical tools and methods to make suggestions on health-centred climate solutions.

Focus on Nature-based Solutions Toward Sustainability
Guest Editors: Xu Yue, Ge Sun, Mariska te Beest, Jun Zhang, Maricar Aguilos, Xianglan Li, Jintai Lin
Deadline: 31 March 2024
This focus issue aims to advance the understanding of the effective roles of nature-based solutions by exploring their impact and feedback mechanisms within Earth systems.

Focus on Social and Environmental Aspects of Resource Extraction of Energy-Transition Minerals
Guest Editors: Datu Buyung Agusdinata, Vigya Sharma, Rennie Kaunda, Anabel Marin, Nwike Iloeje, Kazuyo Matsubae, Ken Coates
Deadline: 30 April 2024
This issue highlights the multiple risks that mining as an economic industry presents to host communities and environments. It interrogates the role that energy transition will likely play in aggravating many of these risks, unless the industry, investors and governments can re-think business models and prioritise social and environmental performance above all else.

Focus on Spatial Analysis of Biodiversity Patterns
Guest Editors: Michele Torresani, Marco Malavasi, Duccio Rocchini, Elizabeth King and Luisa Conti
Deadline: 31 March 2024
This focus collection explores the uncertainties and pitfalls deriving from the representation of spatio-ecological data and different measures of biodiversity.

Toward Carbon Neutrality: Improving Resource Efficiency
Guest Editors: Geng Yong, Hao Han, Raimund Bleischwitz and Anthony Chiu
Deadline: 30 June 2023
This focus issue aims to provide a platform for researchers, policy makers, entrepreneurs, and the general public to share their outstanding research outcomes so that valuable insights can be obtained for preparing appropriate carbon neutrality policies.

Focus on Methane Drawdown
Guest Editors: Robert Jackson, Desiree Plata, Gabrielle Dreyfus, Sam Abernethy, and Celina Scott-Buechler
Deadline: 31 January 2024
This focus issue explores methane mitigation and removal from low-concentration natural and anthropogenic sources for which few or no commercial options are currently available at scale.

Focus on Sustainable Food Systems Transformation
Guest Editors: Kyle F. Davis, Carole Dalin, Shauna Downs, Jessica Gephart, Matti Kummu, Marta Tuninetti
Deadline: 15 November 2023
This focus issue explores research from all aspects and dimensions of sustainable food systems, with a focus on identifying and testing solutions to transform food systems.

Focus on Human-Earth System Interactions under Climate Change
Guest Editors: Huidong Li, Minchao Wu, TC Chakraborty, Anna Rutgersson, Torbern Tagesson, Bing Xue, and Zhonghua Zheng
Deadline: 31 March 2024
This focus collection aims to further understand human-Earth system interactions through state-of-the-art monitoring, modelling, and policy-based analysis for better serving regional and global sustainability and facilitating the achievement of UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Focus on Natural Hazards, Disasters, and Extreme Events
Guest Editors: Tripti Bhattacharya, Mikhail Chester, Vimal Mishra, Jana Sillmann, and Fubao Sun
Deadline: 30 June 2024
This collaborative focus issue aims to bring together research articles, reviews, and perspectives, which provide a holistic view of extreme events in relation to climate change, human health and wellbeing, the built environment, infrastructure and ecology, biodiversity and conservation at the local, regional, and global scale. Articles will be published in one of six participating fully open access journals.

Focus on Technology and Global Change
Guest Editors: Charlie Wilson, Greg Nemet, Laura Diaz Anadon, Frank Geels, Radhika Khosla, Jean-Francois Mercure, Shonali Pachauri, and Ambuj Sagar
Deadline: 31 May 2023
This special collection seeks to extend and enrich understanding of technology and global change, with a view to positively informing major contemporary challenges of climate change and sustainable development. This collection aims to showcase new empirical analyses of the grand patterns of innovation and technological change that help us understand how positive social and environmental impacts can be achieved at scale.

Focus on Permafrost Vulnerability to Climate Change
Guest Editors: Jing Tao, Anna Liljedahl, Christopher Burn, Guido Grosse, Jeannette Noetzli, Scott Goetz, Thomas Douglas, and Yuanhe Yang
Deadline: 31 October 2023
This focus collection aims to document and synthesize frontier research in hydro-biogeochemistry and ecosystem response to climate change over permafrost regions currently and in the future.

Focus on Environmental Footprint Tools for Sustainability
Guest Editors: Allison M Leach, James N Galloway and Jana Compton
Deadline: 31 December 2023
This collection will bring together key findings from nitrogen footprint research; make connections with other environmental footprints; and explore how applying these footprint tools can achieve improved sustainability.

Focus on Tropical Landscape Restoration
Guest Editors: Florian Kraxner, Aline Soterroni, Sonya Dewi, Valerie Kapos, Sabine Fuss, Robin Chazdon, Herry Purnomo and Mercedes Bustamante
Deadline: 31 December 2023
This focus issue addresses the knowledge gaps for tropical restoration with an emphasis on Indonesia and Brazil.

Focus on Markets and the Commons: Pressures, Responses, and Pathways
Guest Editors: Dustin E. Garrick, Abigail Bennett, Graham Epstein, Tanya Hayes, Ruth Meinzen-Dick, Alexander Teytelboym, Sergio Villamayor-Tomas, María Alejandra Vélez
Deadline: 01 September 2022
This focus issue will feature papers to advance theory, innovate methods and build evidence about the varied local impacts of market integration, and the effectiveness of different policy and institutional responses.

Focus on Public Participation in Environmental Research
Guest Editors: Steffen Fritz, Dan Rubenstein and Taru Sanden
Deadline: 31 December 2021
This special issue showcases research in ecology, climate change, sustainable development, drought monitoring, land cover, land-use change, pollution monitoring and water research which involves public participation.

Focus on Earth System Resilience and Tipping Behavior
Guest Editors: Chuixiang Yi, Vasilis Dakos, Manjana Milkoreit, Courtney Quinn, Paul Ritchie, Juan Rocha and Jana Sillmann
Deadline: 31 October 2021
This focus collection highlights research from all aspects of analysing earth system resilience and tipping points across multiple spatial and temporal scales, including mathematical theory, machine learning/AI techniques, social-ecological system sustainability, vulnerability to extreme events, and recovery potential.

Focus on Multi-Scale Water-Energy-Land Nexus Planning to Manage Socio-Economic, Climatic, and Technological Change
Guest Editors: Edo Abraham, Edward Byers, Simon Parkinson, Zarrar Khan
Deadline: 30 September 2021
This focus issue aims to better characterize the energy-water-land nexus, to guide robust decision making across both global and regional scales in nascent infrastructure planning and sectoral transitions. Contributions can be original research articles dealing with applications of existing nexus approaches in sustainability assessment and design of future developments at different scales (i.e. urban to regional planning). New methods that address existing gaps (e.g. related to incorporating processes at different scales, transboundary issues, bridging data gaps, etc) are also welcomed.'

Focus on Legacy Effects of Land use and Management on Water Quality and Ecosystem Function
Guest Editors: Nandita Basu, Kimberly Van Meter, Shreeram Inamdar, Elena Bennett, Emily Bernhardt, Michelle McCrackin
Deadline: 10 September 2020
This focus collection explores science and policy approaches to understand and manage the human health and well-being risks of air pollution and a changing climate

Focus on the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation: Research, Applications and Policy Implications
Guest Editors: Ralph Dubayah, Scott Goetz, John Armston, Bryan Blair, Patrick Burns, Laura Duncanson, Lola Fatoyinbo, Steve Hancock, Matt Hansen, Sean Healy, Michelle Hofton, George Hurtt, Patrick Jantz, Jim Kellner, Scott Luthcke, Carlos Silva and Hao Tang
This on-going collection focuses on the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) spaceborne lidar, which produces high resolution laser ranging observations of the 3D structure of the Earth.

Demand-Side Solutions for Transitioning to Low-Carbon Societies
Guest Editors: Felix Creutzig, Joyashree Roy, Jan Minx
Deadline for Stage 2: 30 September 2020
This collection is primarily interested in publishing systematic reviews, but also open to regular original research letters, that make contributions on demand, services and societal solutions to climate change mitigation.

Evidence Synthesis for Climate Solutions
Guest Editors: Jan Minx, Lea Berrang-Ford, James Ford, Neal Haddaway, Felix Creutzig, Robbert Biesbroek, Biljana Macura
Deadline for Stage 2: 30 September 2020
This collection intends to catalyze synthetic evidence on climate solutions for key topics relevant for IPCC AR6 via a commissioned series of reviews using systematic methods for an enhanced understanding of mitigation and adaptation options.

Focus on Early Career Researchers: Environmental Science in South and South East Asia
Guest Editors: Punyasloke Bhadury, Anwesha Ghosh, Radhika Khosla, Bhoopesh Mishra, Shu-Yuan Pan and Siew Moi Phang
Deadline: 31 December 2022
This focus collection brings together high-quality original research led by early career researchers whose work focuses on South and South East Asia.

Focus on the Future of Water-limited Agricultural Landscapes
Guest Editors: Caitlin A. Peterson, Francisco Fernández, Kristen Dybala, Kyle Frankel Davis, Rajan Ghimire, Rose Roche, and Uday Nidumolu
Deadline: 15 July 2022
This collection explores the human and ecosystem level implications of land use transitions in production landscapes, including the tradeoffs associated with alternative land uses and land abandonment, impacts on food production, environment, and society, scenarios for feasibility, and considerations for planning and implementation of multi-benefit landscapes in the face of water scarcity.

Managing the Global Commons: Sustainable Agriculture and Use of the World's Land and Water Resources in the 21st Century
Guest Editors: Thomas Hertel, Elena Irwin, Steve Polasky, and Navin Ramakutty
Deadline: 31 July 2022
This focus issue concentrates on six areas: climate change, digital agriculture, water resources, ecosystems and biodiversity, governance, and high performance computing for sustainability. Papers will address Sustainable Development Goal solutions and trade-offs in one or more of these areas, within the context of multi-scale analyses. They will address the need for fine-scale analysis of sustainability stresses, while also factoring in the role of national and global drivers of change and the broader repercussions of local policies. We are especially interested in innovative studies that emphasize the emerging area of research involving two-way interactions between global and local scales.

Focus on Environmental Justice: Water and Energy Poverty in the Global South
Guest Editors: Mark New, Nancy Karanja, Nathan Williams, Margaret Skutsch and Jennifer Burney
Deadline: 30 April 2022
This collection focuses on all aspects of water and energy poverty, as well as the related challenges of environmental justice.

Towards carbon-neutral sustainable development of China
Guest Editors: Jintai Lin, Wenjia Cai, Yu Liu, Ji Nie, Xu Yue, Tao Wang, and Qiang Zhang
Deadline: 31 December 2022
This ERL focus collection has being organised in collaboration with the 2021 World Young Scientist Summit (WYSS) and IOPP Environmental Research conference. This collection offers an interdisciplinary outlet to discuss impacts of climate change, earth system interactions, biogeochemical cycles, inter-regional connections, and potential pathways towards carbon neutrality of China.

Focus on Archetypes of Sustainable Land Use and Governance
Guest Editors: Christoph Oberlack, Simona Pedde, Luigi Piemontese, Diana Sietz and Tomas Vaclavik
Deadline: 31 March 2022
This Focus Issue consolidates archetypes of sustainable land use and governance in order to provide a state-of-the-art knowledge resource to transform land use systems towards sustainability across world regions.

Focus on Arctic Change: Transdisciplinary Research and Communication
Guest Editors: Peter Schweitzer, Susanna Gartler, Annett Bartsch, Donatella Zona, Frédéric Bouchard, Stein Sandven and Ylva Sjöberg
Deadline: 31st May 2022
This collection focuses on the challenges associated with changes across the circumpolar Arctic, encompassing transdisciplinary research covering the impacts of global warming on Northern high-latitude ecosystems. Submissions may focus on physical, biological, chemical processes, or human dimensions. Particularly encouraged are submissions reporting on studies integrating multiple approaches within the same research project and novel ways to achieve this integration, as well as initiatives summarizing the scientific knowledge about climate change across the Arctic in layman terms which can be used for communicating science to policymakers.

Focus on Coupled Climate Change, Human and Fire Impacts on Terrestrial Ecosystems
Guest Editors: Sander Veraverbeke, Matthias Boer, Paulo Brando, Adrianna Foster and Scott Goetz
Deadline: 31 December 2021
This focus issue showcases contributions that combine field, remote sensing and modeling approaches to investigate the role and impact of fire in the changing interactions between ecosystems, humans and climate at regional to global scales.

Focus on Plastics from Land to Aquatic Ecosystems
Guest Editors: Tim van Emmerik, Daniel González-Fernández , Charlotte Laufkötter, Martin Blettler, Amy Lusher, Rachel Hurley and Peter Ryan
Deadline: 30 June 2021
This focus issue aims to collect contributions that investigate the transport of plastic pollution from land-based sources into the aquatic environment (rivers, lakes, estuaries, oceans).

Household Energy, Sustainability and Justice: A Tribute to Kirk Smith
Guest Editors: Ambuj Sagar and Ajay Pillarisetti
Deadline: 31 March 2021
This special issue is intended to be a tribute to Kirk Smith and be reflective of his research interests and contributions on the intersections between household energy and sustainability.

Focus on Sustainable Food Systems
Guest Editors: Carole Dalin, Kyle Frankel Davis, Matti Kummu, Landon Marston, Prabhu Pingali, Marta Tuninetti
Deadline: 30 November 2020
This focus collection welcomes research from all aspects of sustainable food systems including natural resource use, rural livelihoods, human health and nutrition, trade, and climate change.

Focus on Climate Change, Air Pollution and Human Health
Guest Editors: Donna Green, Kristie Ebi, Sotiris Vardoulakis, Wenjia Cai and Toon Vandyck
Deadline: 31 October 2020
This focus collection explores science and policy approaches to understand and manage the human health and well-being risks of air pollution and a changing climate

Focus on Satellite Remote Sensing of Atmospheric Environment over Asia
Guest Editors: Jintai Lin, Jhoon Kim, Ronald Cohen, Ronald van der A, Jenny Stavrakou
Deadline: 30 June 2021
This focus collection explores atmospheric environment over Asia based on satellite remote sensing, including combining with other measurement, modeling, and statistical approaches.

Focus on Reactive Nitrogen and the UN Sustainable Development Goals
Guest Editors: Barbara Amon, Benjamin Bodirsky, Henning Friege, Markus Geupel, Luis Lassaletta, N. Raghuram and Wilfried Winiwarter
Deadline: 30 June 2021
This focus collection looks at aligning the integrated management of nitrogen with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Articles will explore integrated science and policy approaches, nutrition and lifestyles, agriculture and food, health, clean water, air and cities, biodiversity, global challenges, and innovations for sustainable management.

Theoretical Analysis of Advanced Intelligent Computing in Environmental Research
Guest Editors: Shiping Wen, Zhongkai Feng, Tingwen Huang and Nian Zhang
Deadline: 31 December 2020
In order to extensively discuss the state-of-the-art theoretical analysis and applications methods of intelligent computing in power sources, this focus issue is organized to provide a platform for sharing interdisciplinary academic and technical achievements and promoting the in-depth theoretical development in environmental research and engineering fields.

Sustainable Cities: Urban Solutions Toward Desired Outcomes
Guest Editors: Matei Georgescu, Mazdak Arabi, Winston Chow, Elizabeth Mack, Karen Seto
Deadline: 31 August 2019
This collection focuses on discovery of urban solutions aimed at accelerating transition to economically, socially, and environmentally resilient cities through integration of desired outcomes as a research framework.

Energy Transitions and Health
Guest Editors: Gavin Pereira, Michelle Bell, Yasushi Honda, Jong-Tae Lee, Lidia Morawska
Deadline: 30 September 2019
This collection will be dedicated to various topics within the energy transitions and health area, focusing on how factors such as climate change, air quality, and the economy will affect health.

Focus on Extreme Precipitation Observations and Process Understanding
Guest Editors: Lisa Alexander, Rémy Roca, Sonia Seneviratne and Andreas Becker
Deadline: 30 April 2019
Papers commissioned as part of this focus collection will cover all aspects of extreme precipitation from observations particularly from a global perspective.

Focus on Transportation and the Environment
Guest Editors: Ethan Coffel, Irene Dedoussi, Steven Barrett and Paul Williams
Deadline: 1 November 2020
This focus collection will explore the effects of transportation on the environment, and vice versa. All aspects of environmental change will be covered, including but not limited to air quality, health impacts, climate, noise, water quality, as well as interactions between them.

Focus on Sustainable Development Goal Interactions Across Socio-Economic and Environmental Dimensions
Guest Editors: Shonali Pachauri, Narasimha Rao and Volker Krey
Deadline: 31 March 2021
The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and the Paris Agreement clearly articulate a shared vision for the globe for the near and long term. To deliver on these multiple goals concurrently, the interactions between them need to be clearly mapped and analysed. This focus issue invites contributions that can address these interactions.

Focus on Social Resilience to Climate Changes Over the Past 5000 Years
Guest Editors: Liang Emlyn Yang, Mara Weinelt, Ingmar Unkel, Peter N. Peregrine and Cameron A. Petrie
Deadline: 31 July 2020
This collection aims to understand different cases, manifestations, and changes of social resilience to climate and environment impacts from pre-historic, historical and contemporary perspectives, from local to global perspectives, and from theoretical, empirical as well as quantitative modeling perspectives.

Is Environmental Science Failing Society? Strategies for Rapid Progress on Climate Action
Guest Editors: James Byrne, Gabrielle Dreyfus, Helen Fricker, Roland Kroebel, Edward Maibach and Chris Rapley
Deadline: 31 July 2020
This focus collection will explore practical ways to accelerate societal action on climate change, where a rebalancing is required from the 'discovery' to the 'delivery' of societal values and commitments.

Systematizing and Upscaling Urban Solutions for Climate Change Mitigation
Guest Editors: Felix Creutzig, Xuemei Bai, Radhika Khosla, Vincent Viguié, Yoshiki Yamagata
Deadline: 31 March 2019
This issue explores the scope to improve and systematize research on urban climate solutions on several intertwined fronts including infrastructure, behaviour, technology, big data, well-being, and policies, governance and transition pathways.

Resilience to Climate Shocks in the Tropics
Guest Editors: Mark Hirons, Emilie Beauchamp, Stephen Whitfield, Declan Conway, Rebecca Asare, Yadvinder Malhi
Deadline: 30 November 2018
This interdisciplinary collection aims to examine the resilience of ecological, social and socio-ecological systems in the tropics to climatic shocks.