Transformations to sustainability and justice have recently encountered backlash and political polarization, violent conflict, democratic backsliding, and dehumanization. In this article, we describe three archetypes of backlash that may affect whether and how transformations unfold. We then explore the role of harnessing hope and imagination, hospicing with dignity, and enabling radical collaboration while holding paradox as three capacities that may prove helpful to navigating backlash during transformative change efforts.

Recognizing backlash as a dynamic of transformations that is distinct from the forms of counter-resistance or contentious politics that have previously been documented as crucial in transformations, we focus on three backlash archetypes and the potential for derailment of transformations to sustainability and justice. Focusing on the specific transformation phase of ‘in-betweenness’ when systems are in flux and the risk of backlash and derailment is high, we suggest there is a need for capacities that help create provisional spaces to grapple with the range of emotional, relational, and political issues underpinning backlash. We explore the role of three transformative capacities for their relevance in addressing backlash and derailment based on existing evidence: harnessing hope and imagination, hospicing with dignity, and enabling radical collaboration while holding paradox.

Societal transformations involve backlash and derailment risks – three archetypes and key capacities to navigate them.

This study explores how community-led initiatives known as ‘seeds’ are transforming Ghana’s food systems. These 80 diverse projects tackle challenges such as hunger, poor nutrition, climate change, and poverty. From promoting sustainable farming and fisheries to creating healthier diets and supporting local economies, the seeds show how local innovation can help achieve global goals, such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). By highlighting these grassroots efforts, the study shows that local actors play a crucial role in building resilient, inclusive, and sustainable food systems, and can inspire broader change by addressing real-world problems in creative and impactful ways.

Food system transformation is essential for achieving the 2030 Agenda, yet top-down policies often overlook the localized, emergent innovations occurring at the community level. This study investigates the potential of ‘seeds’ – locally embedded, small-scale, community-led initiatives – to catalyse transformative shifts towards sustainable and equitable food systems in Ghana. Using a mixed-methods approach, data were collected on 80 food system seeds via online searches, snowball sampling, and community engagement across 11 key study sites. We used a hybrid inductive–deductive coding framework to assign primary and related SDGs to each seed, with four researchers coding after a calibration process to ensure reliability. The seeds contributed to 15 of the 17 SDGs, with a predominant focus on SDG 2 (Zero Hunger), SDG 14 (Life Below Water), and SDG 1 (No Poverty). Analysis indicates that these initiatives move beyond simple project-based interventions by addressing the food–water–energy nexus through decentralized, community-driven pathways. While social and ecological dimensions are frequently prioritized, results highlight significant synergies across goals, demonstrating the capacity of localized seeds to address complex, interconnected food system challenges. This study offers a methodological template to assess the transformative potential of food system seeds, linking grassroots innovation with global sustainability goals.

A study documenting how local innovations are transforming Ghana’s food systems and helping to achieve SDGs.

We are in a polycrisis – the entanglement of crises across multiple, interconnected global systems such as climate, health, and finance – that interact to produce harms significantly greater than the sum of their parts. We propose that, to mitigate and adapt to this polycrisis, strong systemic risk governance is required, and that just and effective governance requires principles. Principles help us to identify common values, provide a framework for decision-making, and lead the necessary societal change towards a shared vision, taking on increasing importance in an ever more complex and fragile world.

We are facing multiple crises, from risks across systems that are central to the safety and prosperity of humanity and ecosystems. Traditional planning and implementation have been based on command-and-control approaches with narrow objectives formulated within a constrained logic model. However, the polycrisis and addressing systemic risk require multiple objectives beyond narrow ones, which cannot address large-scale initiatives in complex, dynamic environments aimed at systems transformation. This requires a deep consideration of what objectives societies and organizations have and how they should meet them. The notion of utilizing a set of guiding principles is critical. Principles are becoming ever more prominent in considerations around the different ways in which societies, organizations, and individuals operate. Principles take on increasing importance in an ever more complex world where our effectiveness depends on adapting to context, guiding adaptation, and facilitating dialogue on options, trade-offs, and choices. We propose a set of 10 principles to guide the development of the field of systemic risk assessment and response within and across multiple domains. These principles – developed to meet the needs of the field of systemic risk – provide a complete set of operating guidelines to drive towards safety, equity, and security for human and ecological systems.

This article proposes 10 principles for systemic risk governance to navigate the polycrisis and ensure a safe future.

Addressing environmental problems like climate change urgently requires the acceleration of sustainability transitions. This Intelligence Briefing explains why this is starting to happen for technical innovations like renewable energy technologies and electric vehicles. Drawing on socio-technical transitions theory, it discusses five acceleration mechanisms that reduce cost, improve performance, change actor orientations, mobilise finance, and increase socio-political support. While not denying their potential relevance, the Briefing also shows that these acceleration mechanisms are not (yet) being activated for social innovations and deep lifestyle change. The Briefing, therefore, also criticises wishful thinking tendencies in some sustainability transformation research strands.

Sustainability transitions should accelerate to address environmental problems like climate change and biodiversity loss. This Intelligence Briefing aims to explain the empirical phenomenon that rapid transitions are starting to happen with regard to several low-carbon technologies (like solar-PV, wind, and electric vehicles), but not with regard to transformative social innovations or lifestyle changes. It identifies and discusses five reasons that help explain this difference: increasing-returns-to-adoption mechanisms; socio-technical feedbacks between technology, actors, and institutions; financial reorientation; issue linkage to wider political goals; and societal acceptance. It further suggests that technical innovations can act as a flywheel or catalyst for subsequent social innovations. And it makes critical comparisons between the socio-technical transitions literature and some approaches in the transformations literature, finding the former more theoretically developed, empirically validated, and policy relevant than the latter for the topic of acceleration.

Low-carbon technologies are starting to accelerate sustainability transitions, while purely social innovations linger.

Recent geopolitical events remind us of the need for a resilient, global approach to sustainability science. This Commentary argues that a diverse, bottom-up approach is essential to ensure sustainability science progresses, even amid shifting political processes that threaten international collaboration and funding. Locally driven solutions that value diverse perspectives and knowledge systems are vital for resilience. By supporting community-led action, sharing ideas across regions, and recognising that sustainability means different things in different places, we can build a more flexible, inclusive, and resilient path toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in an uncertain world.

Recent geopolitical events provide a stark reminder of the need to build a resilient, global approach to sustainability science. Centralised, top-down models of sustainability science are likely to be vulnerable to disruptions, from pandemics to wars, that threaten progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals and jeopardise decades of collaborative advancement that are needed to support future progress. We argue that a decentralised, community-empowered model provides the foundation needed for a resilient sustainability scientific effort. By prioritising local solutions, embracing diverse knowledge systems, and fostering horizontal knowledge exchange, we can create a more resilient and adaptable framework. Sustainability science initiatives need to elevate successful local initiatives, adopt transdisciplinary approaches that include underrepresented knowledge holders, build decentralised knowledge-sharing networks, and recognise that sustainability has different meanings across cultural and geographical contexts.

Decentralised sustainability science: local, diverse, and resilient in a fractious and unpredictable world.

Cities, as complex systems, are faced with increasingly diverse and connected challenges across social, economic, environmental, and health domains. To help cities address these challenges, the Future Earth Urban Knowledge-Action Network developed a cross-disciplinary urban research agenda through expert elicitations and extensive consultation. Five research themes to guide urban sustainability research were identified including: (1) advancing urban sustainability transformations, (2) ensuring equity, (3) boosting innovation in low to lower-middle income countries, (4) managing complexity and systemic risks, and (5) navigating environmental change. Advancing this agenda will require collaboration across disciplines and geographies, transdisciplinary coproduction, and enhanced support to urban science.

Cities and urban regions are at the forefront of transformations toward global sustainability. As urbanization accelerates, there is increasing demand for cities to play multiple, complex and synthetic roles across social and environmental domains within and beyond their boundaries, for example driving economic development while mitigating and adapting to global environmental changes. To help cities in meeting this challenge, urban science, a rapidly growing field that includes inter- and transdisciplinary research, needs to expand and evolve, with clear priorities. Combining expert elicitation and community consultation, the Future Earth Urban Knowledge-Action Network developed a strategic research agenda for urban science for the next decade. The urban science research agenda describes five critical research themes for scientific advances: (1) accelerate urban sustainability transformations, (2) ensure equity and inclusivity, (3) amplify innovation from the low to lower-middle income countries, (4) negotiate complexity and systemic risks, and (5) navigate environmental change. Under each research theme, we review the state of the art, identify remaining gaps, and outline key research questions needing to be addressed to advance science toward urban transformations. Interconnections across, and enabling conditions to advance, these priority research themes are discussed.

Globally co-designed urban research agenda reveals pressing priorities for sustainability and resilience.

This article explores air pollution as a globally connected issue using the telecoupling lens, which links distant regions through environmental and human systems. It shows how pollution connects Africa and the Global North, demonstrating that actions in one place affect people and air quality elsewhere. Drawing on 90 research sources, it looks at how satellite data helps monitor air quality and finds that most studies focus on natural sciences, with limited input from social sciences and less frequently from African researchers. The authors highlight the need to close data gaps and call for more inclusive, cross-disciplinary, and international cooperation in air quality research. Overall, the study pushes for fairer, more connected approaches to understanding and tackling air pollution worldwide.

Air quality (AQ) is a transboundary phenomenon resulting from globalized interactions between coupled human and natural systems. Drawing on the telecoupling framework, this article argues that pollution flows, socioeconomic systems, and policy responses interconnect Africa with the Global North and identifies important data gaps for better understanding these interconnections. Through a meta-synthesis of 90 academic and gray literature sources, we analyze the use of satellite data for air quality monitoring, with a particular focus on interdisciplinary collaboration and African scientific participation. Our findings highlight a strong reliance on natural science approaches, limited integration of social science perspectives, and ongoing marginalization of African voices in shaping research agendas. We argue for a transformative research agenda rooted in interdisciplinary integration, inter-regional collaboration, and data justice. By adopting a telecoupled lens and prioritizing inclusive development, this study provides new pathways to understand, measure, and address air pollution as a global issue with deeply local consequences.

Air pollution links Africa & the Global North–study urges data justice & inclusive, global cooperation.

Advocates of the concept of polycrisis show that our world faces many interconnected risks that can compound and reinforce each other. Marxist critics, on the contrary, argue that polycrisis advocates have not yet given sufficient attention to the role of capitalism as a root cause of these intersecting crises. This paper agrees with these critics. But I also argue that it is possible to develop an alternative approach to polycrisis analysis rooted in the traditions of Marxism and neo-Gramscian theory. The paper applies this approach to analyze the European Union's ongoing polycrisis and sketch out its possible futures.

Advocates of the term polycrisis often claim that contemporary crises cannot be reduced to a single driver or dominant contradiction, forming instead a complex multiplicity of inter-systemic shocks. Marxist critics, on the contrary, claim that this approach, by framing contemporary crises as disparate and merely contingently connected, obscures the capitalist roots of contemporary crises. I agree with these critics to a point, though I argue that polycrisis thinking is needed to deepen Marxist analyses of the inter-systemic dynamics of contemporary crises and their possible futures. Polycrisis thinking needs Marxism to deepen its analysis of the political economy of polycrisis, whereas Marxism needs polycrisis thinking to enrich its understanding of the political opportunities and constraints that these intersecting crises may create for counter-hegemonic movements. To synthesize the insights of Marxism and polycrisis analysis, I develop an approach rooted in complexity theory and neo-Gramscian political economy. Using the European Union's (EU) ongoing polycrisis as an illustrative example, I show how neo-Gramscian polycrisis analysis can highlight the constraints that neoliberal hegemony places on the EU's efforts to manage its intersecting crises, while also informing counter-hegemonic struggles aiming to navigate toward more desirable futures in Europe's political possibility space.

This paper combines polycrisis thinking and Marxism to analyze the current polycrisis and possible futures of the European Union.

Cosmetics, including makeup, perfumes, and facial care products, have a significant impact on the environment and society, particularly as they are used by many consumers daily. The industry's continued growth further contributes to this impact. This paper reviews 365 articles on existing research on sustainable cosmetics. Findings of this review showed that Italy, Brazil, and Spain are the countries with the highest number of research articles. It was also noted that many studies were from chemical and pharmaceutical disciplines, whereas there is minimal research through a social science lens. These insights provide avenues for future sustainability research in the cosmetics industry.

Cosmetics have become an essential part of daily life, but their impact on the environment and society cannot be ignored. With the cosmetics industry experiencing almost continuous growth, it is imperative to ensure its sustainability. While several studies have examined various aspects of cosmetics and sustainability, there is no comprehensive overview of the literature in this field. To address this gap, this review aims to categorize the extant literature thematically and identify areas that require further research. A systematic review of 365 selected journal articles published from 1992 to 2022 revealed several insights. Firstly, the number of publications in this area has increased significantly over the years. Secondly, Italy has the highest number of publications, and Sustainability is the most popular publication outlet. Thirdly, research output from chemistry, chemical engineering, and pharmacy disciplines is abundant, while social science disciplines have comparatively few studies. Fourthly, experimental procedures are the most commonly used research methods. Finally, ‘process and technology’ is the most studied area, while ‘stakeholder behavior’ is the least studied area. These findings highlight research gaps and suggest future research directions to promote sustainability in the cosmetics industry.

This review looks at 30 years of research on sustainable cosmetics and identifies areas that need to be explored.

Transdisciplinary sustainability scientists work with many different actors in pursuit of change. In so doing they make choices about why and how to engage with different perspectives in their research. Reflexivity – active individual and collective critical reflection – is considered an important capacity for researchers to address the resulting ethical and practical challenges. We developed a framework for reflexivity as a transformative capacity in sustainability science through a critical systems approach, which helps make any decisions that influence which perspectives are included or excluded in research explicit. We suggest that transdisciplinary sustainability research can become more transformative by nurturing reflexivity.

Transdisciplinary sustainability science is increasingly applied to study transformative change. Yet, transdisciplinary research involves diverse actors who hold contrasting and sometimes conflicting perspectives and worldviews. Reflexivity is cited as a crucial capacity for navigating the resulting challenges, yet notions of reflexivity are often focused on individual researcher reflections that lack explicit links to the collective transdisciplinary research process and predominant modes of inquiry in the field. This gap presents the risk that reflexivity remains on the periphery of sustainability science and becomes ‘unreflexive’, as crucial dimensions are left unacknowledged. Our objective was to establish a framework for reflexivity as a transformative capacity in sustainability science through a critical systems approach. We developed and refined the framework through a rapid scoping review of literature on transdisciplinarity, transformation, and reflexivity, and reflection on a scenario study in the Red River Basin (US, Canada). The framework characterizes reflexivity as the capacity to nurture a dynamic, embedded, and collective process of self-scrutiny and mutual learning in service of transformative change, which manifests through interacting boundary processes – boundary delineation, interaction, and transformation. The case study reflection suggests how embedding this framework in research can expose boundary processes that block transformation and nurture more reflexive and transformative research.

Transdisciplinary sustainability research may become more transformative by nurturing reflexivity as a dynamic, embedded, and collective learning process.