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Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a family of fluorinated organic compounds of anthropogenic origin. Due to their unique chemical properties, widespread production, ubiquitous environmental distribution, long-term persistence, bioaccumulative potential, and associated risks for human health, PFAS have been classified as persistent organic pollutants of significant concern. Scientific evidence from the last several decades suggests that their widespread occurrence in the environment correlates with adverse effects on human health and ecology. The presence of PFAS in the aquatic environment demonstrates a close link between the anthroposphere and the hydrological cycle, and concentrations of PFAS in surface and groundwater range in value along the ng L−1–μg L−1 scale. Here, we critically reviewed the research published in the last decade on the global occurrence and distribution of PFAS in the aquatic environment. This is the first study to critically evaluate the occurrence of PFAS at continental scale and the evolving global regulatory responses to manage and mitigate the adverse human health risks posed by PFAS. The review reports that PFAS are ubiquitous despite being phased out—they have been detected in different continents irrespective of the level of industrial development. Their occurrence far from the potential sources suggests that long-range atmospheric transport is an important pathway of PFAS distribution. Recently, several studies have investigated the health impacts of PFAS exposure—they have been detected in biota, drinking water, food, air, and human serum. In response to the emerging information about PFAS toxicity, several countries have provided administrative guidelines for PFAS in water, including Canada, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, Germany, and Australia. In the US, additional regulatory measures are under consideration. Further, many PFAS have now been listed as persistent organic pollutants. This comprehensive review provides crucial baseline information on the global occurrence, distribution, and regulatory framework of PFAS.

Soil water repellency (SWR) is a widespread phenomenon that influences patterns of soil wetting, runoff, evapotranspiration and availability of water for plants. In natural ecosystems there is emerging evidence that some plants can take advantage of non-uniform wetting patterns, leading to the emergence of co-evolutionary behaviour. In this review, SWR is considered in terms of five spheres of influence. Given the presence of hydrophobic organic material in the biosphere, the strength, severity and persistence of SWR is influenced by properties at the surface of the lithosphere and prevailing conditions in the atmosphere and hydrosphere. These in turn, can be modified by activities in the anthroposphere. This review thus examines the strength, severity and persistence of non-wetting behaviour with reference to these five spheres of influence and also the interactions between the spheres. It is focused on (i) how SWR is characterised to provide insight into how different measurement techniques have specific operational ranges, (ii) how SWR has developed as an indirect consequence of evolution in natural ecosystems and (iii) how feedbacks across the different spheres have emerged. It demonstrates that management and restoration of natural ecosystems with water repellent soils is very different from management of productive crops in monocultural agricultural systems, controlled in the anthroposphere.

Tracking the concentration of elements in the organs of endangered animal species can provide significant knowledge about environmental hazards and allows more targeted protective measures to be taken. In this paper the differences in concentrations of 27 elements in the livers of free-ranging European bison were studied. The ICP-OES method was applied to study the four main Polish populations, which live in lowland (Bialowieska, Knyszynska and Borecka forests) and mountain (Bieszczady) habitats. The study was based on a unique and relatively large amount of comparative material. It was found that European bison populations that live in different locations differ from each other in terms of the hepatic concentrations of 17 of the elements studied in this work. The mountain population in Bieszczady was most distinctive due to the higher concentrations of Ba, Ca, Cd, Se, and the lower concentrations of Mo and V (compared to the other populations). Additionally, even geographically close lowland populations sometimes have different hepatic concentrations of particular elements. The sex and age of individuals have a weak effect on mineral status. Although the lithosphere is the primary factor that affects the availability of elements for the European bison, the soil parameters and biosphere can significantly affect the availability of elements, e.g. by accumulation. It was also shown that the anthroposphere plays a role, but this is mainly through agriculture as feeding on arable fields significantly changes the mineral status of European bison. The need for further research, especially on Cd, Se and Cu, was indicated. It was concluded that toxic elements or deficiencies in essential elements in the populations of the studied species should be considered locally as this would allow better understanding of the health condition of individual populations.

Mining is often portrayed as a contributor to sustainable development, especially so in developing countries such as Papua New Guinea (PNG). Since 1970, several large mines have been developed in PNG (e.g. Panguna, Ok Tedi, Porgera, Lihir, Ramu) but always with controversial environmental standards and social impacts often overlooked or ignored. In PNG, mine wastes are approved to be discharged to rivers or oceans on a very large scale, leading to widespread environmental and social impacts - to the point of civil war in the case of Panguna. The intimate links between indigenous communities and their environment have invariably been under-estimated or ignored, leading many to question mining's role in PNG's development. Here, we review the geology of PNG, its mineral resources, mining history, key trends for grades and resources, environmental metrics (water, energy, carbon), mine waste management, and regulatory and governance issues. The study provides a unique and comprehensive insight into the sustainable development contribution of the mining industry in PNG - especially the controversial practices of riverine and marine mine waste disposal. The history of mining is a complex story of the links between the anthroposphere, biosphere, hydrosphere and geosphere. Ultimately, this study demonstrates that the scale of environmental and social impacts and risks are clearly related to the vast scale of mine wastes - a fact which remains been poorly recognised. For PNG, the promise of mining-led development remains elusive to many communities and they are invariably left with significant social and environmental legacies which will last for decades to centuries (e.g. mine waste impacts on water resources). Most recently, the PNG government has moved to ban riverine tailings disposal for future projects and encourage greater transparency and accountability by the mining sector, including its interactions with communities. There remains hope for better outcomes in the future.

The plastic waste disposal strongly raised in importance in the recent past and it is approaching a critical situation worldwide, so requiring putting in practice the criteria of circular economy by avoiding meaningless policy responses against the plastic materials. The world of plastic materials includes a wide range of goods in all the sectors of our life: packaging, construction, biomedicals, etc. The answer to the plastic waste disposal is build an industrial network characterized by reliability, flexibility, sustainability, utility in the industrial cycle and ability to provide useful products to the market. The traditional processes including recycling and energy recovery fulfil only a part of these conditions and need to be assessed in correlation to their real effect on the circular economy such as the uses of the obtained products in the anthroposphere's life cycle, the burdens generated by the processes itself, etc. Among the possible processes that can be more sustainable if compared with the traditional ones, in a real circular economy perspective, those based on thermochemical exploitation of products obtained by plastics are discussed and assessed. The results show that it is possible to transform an expensive and non-resolving plastic waste management system in an industrial network having an intrinsic economic sustainability and, overall, a well-defined role in the economic chain of plastics. The results show that an integration between the present system with the production of petrochemical products, including oil/gasoline/syngas/…, strongly improve the economic performance of the overall waste system, allowing a larger savings of not-renewable resources, a limited greenhouse burden, a release in the market of valuable products instead of poor quality materials and the minimization of waste destined to be landfilled.

Sustainability has been at the forefront of the environmental research agenda of the integrated anthroposphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere since the last century and will continue to be critically important for future environmental science. However, linking humans and the environment through effective policy remains a major challenge for sustainability research and practice. Here we address this gap using an agent-based model (ABM) for a coupled natural and human systems in the Smoky Hill River Watershed (SHRW), Kansas, USA. For this freshwater-dependent agricultural watershed with a highly variable flow regime influenced by human-induced land-use and climate change, we tested the support for an environmental policy designed to conserve and protect fish biodiversity in the SHRW. We develop a proof of concept interdisciplinary ABM that integrates field data on hydrology, ecology (fish richness), social-psychology (value-belief-norm) and economics, to simulate human agents' decisions to support environmental policy. The mechanism to link human behaviors to environmental changes is the social-psychological sequence identified by the value-belief-norm framework and is informed by hydrological and fish ecology models. Our results indicate that (1) cultural factors influence the decision to support the policy; (2) a mechanism modifying social-psychological factors can influence the decision-making process; (3) there is resistance to environmental policy in the SHRW, even under potentially extreme climate conditions; and (4) the best opportunities for policy acceptance were found immediately after extreme environmental events. The modeling approach presented herein explicitly links biophysical and social science has broad generality for sustainability problems.

Despite the growing popularity of bottom-up fishery management schemes not all socio-ecological systems respond well to this approach. Unfortunately, due to the heterogeneous nature of socio-ecological systems and lack of long-term, place-based studies we have yet to disentangle the impact of social attributes on their sustainability. The gooseneck barnacle fishery in Asturias, a fishery with a long-standing tradition of bottom-up management schemes and a plethora of spatially explicit data, provides a unique opportunity to test the effect of social attributes on 7, heterogeneous, co-managed, Territorial Use Rights for Fishing (TURFs) areas. We developed an integrated index that reflects the sustainability of each individual Asturian TURF on 2 key spheres of the total environment: biosphere and anthroposphere. Additionally, we carried out detailed surveys to assess both user and governance social attributes in each TURF. The effect of these attributes on the sustainability index was assessed using Linear Regression Analysis, One Way Analysis of Variance and Analysis of Covariance. According to our results, social factors are key drivers for the sustainability of a bottom-up management system. Additionally, bottom-up management schemes promote strong governance social attributes but can be systematically weakened if user-defined social attributes are lacking. Fortunately, user-defined attributes tend to be linked and can have a compensating effect, as was the case in Asturias were conflict resolution mechanisms and strong leadership were able to compensate for low cooperation within the TURFs. Thus, social attributes must be considered when assessing the suitability or sustainability of bottom-up management schemes.

Riparian vegetation is a crucial component of fluvial systems and serves multiple socio-ecological functions. The objective of this review is to follow the scientific trajectory of studies of riparian vegetation throughout history and across regions and fields of knowledge. Such a synthesis is challenging because riparian vegetation is an open co-constructed socio-ecological system at the crossroads of the biosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere and anthroposphere; thus, it exhibits a wide range of ecological patterns and functioning depending on climatic, morphological and land-use contexts. To address this, we used qualitative and quantitative approaches in our review of the scientific literature. From the scientific perspective, how riparian vegetation is studied has changed over time (e.g. development of modeling and geomatic approaches) and varies among fluvial systems and geographic areas (e.g. its relation to groundwater is usually studied more in Oceania and Asia than on other continents). This review revealed the lack of a single and well-identified scientific community that focuses on riparian vegetation. This is probably due to the nature of the subject, which includes diverse fields of knowledge and several applied issues: biodiversity, forestry, water quality, hydromorphology, restoration, ecology, etc. Some topics are actively regenerated (e.g. biogeomorphological approaches) and others are emerging, which reflects general trends in ecology (e.g. functional approaches). The literature review indicates that a substantial amount of knowledge already exists; therefore, a major priority of our study is to produce a clear and integrative understanding of riparian zone functioning to address the inherent complexity of these zones and remain valid across a wide diversity of geographical contexts. It is also essential to develop detailed analysis of the sociocultural dimension of riparian vegetation to understand the ecology of riparian zones and to improve riparian vegetation management according to local recommendations in order to maintain and improve its functions and services in the face of global changes.

The landscape surrounding urban areas is often used as farmland. With the observed expansion of urban areas over the last decades and a projected continuation of this trend, our objective was to analyze how urbanization affects food supply and demand in The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. We used a chain of simulation models covering components of the atmosphere (climate simulations), biosphere (crop yield calculations), and anthroposphere (simulations of urban expansion and land-use change) to calculate the effect of farmland displacement on land and water resources (hydrosphere). Our simulations show that the displacement of farmland itself has hardly any effect on cropland demand, crop yields, or irrigation water requirements. These results indicate that Jordan has sufficient productive areas available to buffer effects of urban expansion on food production for the next decades. However, this picture changes dramatically once we include changes in socioeconomy and climate in our simulations. The isolated effect of climate change results in an expected increase in irrigation water requirements of 19 MCM by 2025 and 64 MCM by 2050. It furthermore leads to an increase in cropland area of 147 km2 by 2025 and 265 km2 by 2050. While the combined analysis of urban expansion, climate change, and socioeconomic change makes optimistic assumptions on the increase in crop yields by 2050, the results still indicate a pronounced effect on cropland demands (2700 km2) and a steep increase in irrigation water requirements (439 MCM). Our simulation results highlight the importance of high resolution, spatially explicit projections of future land changes as well as the importance of spatiotemporal scenario studies at the regional level to help improving water planning strategies.

Driven by contamination risks, mapping Vulnerability Indices (VI) of multiple aquifers (both unconfined and confined) is investigated by integrating the basic DRASTIC framework with multiple models overarched by Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). The DRASTIC framework is a proactive tool to assess VI values using the data from the hydrosphere, lithosphere and anthroposphere. However, a research case arises for the application of multiple models on the ground of poor determination coefficients between the VI values and non-point anthropogenic contaminants. The paper formulates SCFL models, which are derived from the multiple model philosophy of Supervised Committee (SC) machines and Fuzzy Logic (FL) and hence SCFL as their integration. The Fuzzy Logic-based (FL) models include: Sugeno Fuzzy Logic (SFL), Mamdani Fuzzy Logic (MFL), Larsen Fuzzy Logic (LFL) models. The basic DRASTIC framework uses prescribed rating and weighting values based on expert judgment but the four FL-based models (SFL, MFL, LFL and SCFL) derive their values as per internal strategy within these models. The paper reports that FL and multiple models improve considerably on the correlation between the modeled vulnerability indices and observed nitrate-N values and as such it provides evidence that the SCFL multiple models can be an alternative to the basic framework even for multiple aquifers. The study area with multiple aquifers is in Varzeqan plain, East Azerbaijan, northwest Iran.

Fracking has become a hot topic in the media and public discourse not only because of its economic benefit but also its environmental impacts. Recently, scientists have investigated the environmental impacts of fracking, and most studies focus on its air and ground water pollution. A systematic research structure and an overall evaluation of fracking's impacts on the environment are needed, because fracking does not only influence ground water but most environmental elements including but not limited to air, water, soil, rock, vegetation, wildlife, human, and many other ecosystem components. From the standpoint of the total environment, this communication assesses the overall impacts of fracking on the environment and then designs a total environmental study paradigm that effectively examines the complicated relationship among the total environment. Fracking dramatically changes the anthroposphere, which in turn significantly impacts the atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere through the significant input or output of water, air, liquid or solid waste disposals, and the complex chemical components in fracking fluids. The proposed total environment study paradigm of fracking can be applied to other significant human activities that have dramatic impacts on the environment, such as mountain top coal mining or oil sands for environmental studies.

The grand challenges of the 21st century will increasingly require societies to reconsider the pathways taken thus far. Engagement with climate change is of ever-growing importance to young people. They will be confronted with the effects of climate change throughout their entire lives and, as future decision-makers, they will vitally shape societal developments. Education will thus play a crucial role in the transformation to a sustainable society. In terms of awareness-raising, an important first step in preparing young people for the challenges of the 21st century is to understand what content is connected with climate change. As complex challenges, such as climate change, demand ways of thinking that go beyond categories, interconnections between the anthroposphere and the natural sphere have to be taken into consideration. This study provides an insight into the questions and topics young people develop whilst becoming involved in climate change in an in-school learning setting and in an out-of-school learning setting (a high mountain environment). The analysis focuses on the question of in which spheres students predominantly make their thematic choices and how far the interconnections between different spheres are formed. Our results show that the choice of the learning setting influences the topics students connect with climate change. Interconnections between sub-spheres of the anthroposphere and natural sphere are made only occasionally. These findings serve as a basis for reconsidering the content and foundation of climate change communication with young people. We recommend that climate change educational programmes should include phases that allow the following: a) involvement with climate change issues related to single spheres in the first phase, and b) consideration of the interconnections between spheres when becoming involved with climate change issues in the second phase. As the educational setting can considerably influence the focus of the learning process, it should be chosen thoughtfully.

While there are well established early warning systems for a number of natural phenomena (e.g. earthquakes, catastrophic fires, tsunamis), we do not have an early warning system for biodiversity. Yet, we are losing species at an unprecedented rate, and this especially occurs in tropical rainforests, the biologically richest but most eroded biome on earth. Unfortunately, there is a chronic gap in standardized and pan-tropical data in tropical forests, affecting our capacity to monitor changes and anticipate future scenarios. The Tropical Ecology, Assessment and Monitoring (TEAM) Network was established to contribute addressing this issue, as it generates real time data to monitor long-term trends in tropical biodiversity and guide conservation practice. We present the Network and focus primarily on the Terrestrial Vertebrates protocol, that uses systematic camera trapping to detect forest mammals and birds, and secondarily on the Zone of Interaction protocol, that measures changes in the anthroposphere around the core monitoring area. With over 3 million images so far recorded, and managed using advanced information technology, TEAM has created the most important data set on tropical forest mammals globally. We provide examples of site-specific and global analyses that, combined with data on anthropogenic disturbance collected in the larger ecosystem where monitoring sites are, allowed us to understand the drivers of changes of target species and communities in space and time. We discuss the potential of this system as a candidate model towards setting up an early warning system that can effectively anticipate changes in coupled human-natural system, trigger management actions, and hence decrease the gap between research and management responses. In turn, TEAM produces robust biodiversity indicators that meet the requirements set by global policies such as the Aichi Biodiversity Targets. Standardization in data collection and public sharing of data in near real time are essential features of such system.

Triclosan (TCS) is a broad spectrum antibacterial agent mainly used in Pharmaceutical and Personal Care Products. Its increasing use over recent decades have raised its concentration in the environment, with commonly detectable levels found along the food web-from aquatic organisms to humans in the ecosystem. To date, there is shortage of information on how to investigate TCS's systematic risk on exposed organisms including humans, due to the paucity of systematic information on TCS flows in the anthroposphere. Therefore, a more holistic approach to mass flow balancing is required, such that the systematic risk of TCS in all environmental matrices are evaluated. From the perspective of Substance Flow Analysis (SFA), this review critically summarizes the current state of knowledge on TCS production, consumption, discharge, occurrence in built and natural environments, its exposure and metabolism in humans, and also the negative effects of TCS on biota and humans. Recent risk concerns have mainly focused on TCS removal efficiencies and metabolism, but less attention is given to the effect of mass flows from source to fate during risk exposure. However, available data for TCS SFA is limited but SFA can derive logical systematic information from limited data currently available for systematic risk assessment and reduction, based on mass flow analysis. In other words, SFA tool can be used to develop a comprehensive flow chart and indicator system for the risk assessment and reduction of TCS flows in the anthroposphere, thereby bridging knowledge gaps to streamline uncertainties related to policy-making on exposure pathways within TCS flow-lines. In the final analysis, specifics on systematic TCS risk assessment via SFA, and areas of improvement on human adaptation to risks posed by emerging contaminants are identified and directions for future research are suggested.

An attempt is made to quantify the global element cycle for arsenic, based on an extensive literature research with special emphasis on the most recent works. Reservoirs in and fluxes within and through lithosphere, atmosphere, pedosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and anthroposphere are being presented. Crucial knowledge gaps are addressed and some simple model calculations partially question currently held ideas about sources, pathways, and the fate of arsenic in the environment.