Biodiversity and ecosystems are foundational to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). They are explicitly recognized in SDG 14 (Life Below Water) and SDG 15 (Life on Land), which aim to conserve and sustainably use aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. Biodiversity and healthy ecosystems also support SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) by providing the variety of life that underpins agricultural productivity. They contribute to SDG 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation) by providing essential water filtration services, and to SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-being) by regulating disease and offering potential sources for medical discoveries. Moreover, these biological resources play a significant role in climate change mitigation and adaptation, linking to SDG 13 (Climate Action). Hence, the protection of biodiversity and ecosystems is essential to achieving multiple SDGs.
This book chapter advances SDGs 15 and 11 by reviewing the anthropogenic activities worldwide that have caused ecological degradation resulting in the need to mitigate damage to essential ecosystem services in rural and urban areas.
This article supports SDG 2, SDG 3 and SDG 15 by highlighting the win-win solutions for national parks to both protect nature and improve local people's wellbeing.
This book chapter advances SDG 15 by bringing current bioremediation techniques together to compare, understand, and effectively apply strategies to exclude inorganic pollutants from contaminated environments, keeping in view the effectiveness and economics of bioremediation strategies.
Food production entails a series of steps and operations that convert raw biomass into final products suitable for human consumption. Along the production chain, an enormous amount of side stream is generated. On one side, these represent a burden for the producers due to related disposal issues. On the other hand, many side streams are recognised as a valuable mass containing broad variety of health beneficial and functional ingredients.
The diversification of tropical pastures with legumes (trees) for increased forage and animal productivity has been advocated. Nevertheless, effects on soil quality and belowground biodiversity, and the implications for sustainable intensification remain poorly documented, particularly when cattle grazing is included in the study. We evaluated the impact of forage system diversification with herbaceous and woody legumes on soil properties and soil macrofauna communities and their spatial heterogeneity in a three-year-old field trial in Cauca Valley, Colombia.
Viticulture is a valuable sector worldwide with an extraordinary socio-economic impact in Spain. Numerous pests and diseases threaten vineyards, and their management primarily relies on the use of conventional agrochemicals. The current paradigm of sustainability pursues the implementation of ecologically sound strategies in vineyard ecosystems. The use of cover crops is arising as an alternative with numerous benefits, including favoring above-belowground biodiversity and the presence of beneficial soil organisms such as the entomopathogenic nematodes (EPNs).
Fire is an ecological disturbance that alters soil microbiomes and the functions they mediate in terrestrial ecosystems. Soil microbial diversity in Mediterranean Basin ecosystems shows resilience to fire following the restoration of plant-soil feedbacks. We hypothesised that microbial functions related to organic matter decomposition and nutrient cycling might show similar patterns of recovery.
The biochemical effects of trees may significantly influence local pedogenesis as well as pedocomplexity, biodiversity and forest dynamics on both stand and landscape scales. One such effect is the decay of tree trunks, which is driven by organisms, and especially by the microbiome. Decomposition modifies soil formation, which due to the existence of many feedbacks affects the composition of the decomposer community.
Landscape fragmentation and farming can affect the diversity of plants and pollinators harbored by linear landscape elements (LLE) in agroecosystems. To assess the role of these habitats in sustaining plant-pollinator communities, twenty portions of LLE (road verges) were studied during two consecutive field seasons in the Argentine Pampas.
In 2018, Dr. Alessio Adamiano, a researcher for the Italian National Research Council at the Institute of Science and Technology for Ceramic Materials, was awarded the second prize of €25,000. Contributing to SDGs 2, 13 and 14, his project, “Phos-Fate: Empowering fishing communities for climate change”, demonstrated how phosphorous can be recycled in a simple, scalable way by converting fish bones into products such as fertilizers. Two years later, we interviewed Dr. Adamiano about his experience at the Challenge, as well as the upcoming steps for his project empowering fishing communities for climate change.
