Volume 6 Issue 5, May 2025

Nature Reviews Earth & Environment interviewed Laura Carter about their project investigating emerging contaminants in agricultural systems.

Nature Reviews Earth & Environment interviewed Biao Zhu about their project investigating whole-soil carbon dynamics in a future warmer world.

Nature Reviews Earth & Environment interviewed Abhirup Dikshit about their project investigating flash drought and bushfires.

Lidia Rodríguez-Méndez explains how geological maps produced using bathymetric data can provide insight into marine environments.

Johanna Buerkert explains how resilience analyses can be used to implement laws that support the capacity of socio-ecological systems to cope with stressors.

Deforestation footprints identify trade- and consumption-linked hot spots of forest loss. This Review synthesizes existing footprint assessments, finding that Brazil, Indonesia and China are major drivers of commodity-linked deforestation, but that estimates are influenced by method choice.

Natural hydrogen is generated through chemical and radioactive processes in the Earth’s crust, and could be an important future clean chemical feedstock and energy resource. This Review examines the processes of geological hydrogen generation, migration, accumulation and preservation that enable the development of exploitable reserves.

The collision of the Indian, Arabian and Eurasian plates formed the Tibetan and Iranian plateaus, but its timing and processes remain debated. This Review explores the evidence behind initial collision estimates and discusses the tectonic and geodynamic implications.