Environments: Enhancing Diversity of Environmental Systems: Nature as a Shared Wealth, Not a Commodity

1. Introduction

The biosphere (as the habitat of all species, including humans) and its self-organization, to provide deep interactions and support biodiversity, require full understanding and appropriate environmental policy making. The Journal Environments, with its final “s”, clearly refers to the multiplicity and diversity of environmental systems and species, each one linked to all the others, all together contributing to create a symphony of colors, sounds, habits, habitats, and production and consumption patterns from which every species benefits and to which every species contributes, in terms of sustainability and quality of existence. Humans, at the top of the evolutionary hierarchy, should not consider nature and its diversity as a market from which to withdraw without limits but instead as a living community to be understood in its dynamics and boundaries, protected in its abundance, enjoyed in its richness. Environments and its large research network have already highlighted and investigated the diversity of environmental systems, their pulsing cycles and species interactions and, most of all, the role of human species: environmental impacts and Earth management as a shared house according to rigorous rules for each species survival. The next step for Environments is to apply its deep and broad knowledge on environmental systems to design a resilient species community for shared well-being and responsibility. In this regard, the Editorial Board has updated the Aims and Scope page of the journal, aiming to create a more comprehensive and integrated framework. The Aims and Scope updated version provides a clearer list of research topics in order to assist authors towards deeper understanding, more appropriate choice of the journal, and improved submissions. In particular, three specific aspects are highlighted: Assessment methods and environmental impacts; terrestrial, marine and urban ecosystems dynamics; and shared responsibility for resource use within environmental and circular economics. These aspects design the search for the global health of the environment, the humans within it, and other species interacting with them.

2. Description, Deepening, and Understanding of Environmental Systems

The plurality of environmental systems provides at the same time a large number of habitats for different species and very diverse ways for interaction among humans and other species. Let us only mention trees, be they natural forests, managed plantations, or urban trees. Humans receive from them many valuable environmental services (evapotranspiration, shading and cooling, CO₂ uptake and O₂ release, precipitations interception, pollutants and PM absorption, among others). An important aspect is that tree services are not only provided to humans but also to other species so as to ensure their survival and well-being (e.g., nesting, food, pollen, temperature regulation, interaction and synergies among species, etc.). Being aware of the services provided by trees as well as by species to each other, it is important for humans to also understand their own role within the overall environmental system in which they are embedded as well as the risks that each species faces whenever another species disappears.

2.1. Assessment Methods and Environmental Management Technologies: Development and Application of Environmental Data, Investigation Tools and Decision Support Systems

The complexity of environmental systems requires at the same time the application of an integrated set of assessment methods, among which lifecycle assessment [1], risk assessment [2,3], ecological footprint [4]; water footprint (WFN, 2025) [5]; material flow analysis (MFA, 2023) [6]; ecological network analysis (Fath et al., 2019) [7]; emergy accounting (Odum, 1996; Brown and Ulgiati, 2004; Ulgiati and Brown, 2006) [8,9,10]; effective management patterns play a role to prevent excess resource withdrawal as well as inadequate decision-making in economic and societal planning, by properly designing human relations with the surrounding environment as a source and a sink. Comprehensive databases dealing at the same time with the size and the structure of environmental systems and the potential impacts of human activities as well as validated investigation methods capable of addressing and understanding the dynamics of the interaction of human activities with ecosystems and other species are much-needed tools to achieve an appropriate understanding and managing of environmental systems to ensure their survival and at the same time their safe interaction with each other.

2.2. Environmental Impact and Risk Assessment: Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Ecosystem Resilience Under Global Warming

The way humans interact with environmental systems generates many impacts at different times and space scales, characterized by different risks in terms of scope and likelihood. Global warming and related climate change are only one, although very important, example of human activity consequences, affecting ecosystems in many ways, from changes in species composition to freshwater decrease, changed frequency of atmospheric events, and more. However, other human activity-related emissions (e.g., particulate matter release; microplastics; chemical releases to air, water and soil) are likely to generate terrestrial, marine, and human toxicity that are difficult to monitor and even more difficult to address and decrease. Prevention and mitigation of such impacts require appropriate monitoring tools as well as deep changes in consumption and production patterns.

3. Specific Environmental Aspects’ Description and Conservation

3.1. Terrestrial and Marine Biodiversity and Habitat Loss Prevention

Loss of terrestrial and marine species, due to pollution, climate change, and degraded habitats (soil, forests, coastal environments, among others), is growing at an unbelievable velocity, bearing significant consequences on the global composition of local ecosystems. These consequences are difficult to foresee in many specific cases, although instead very clear in other cases, such as the fast decrease in pollinator species. A very detailed investigation and description of biodiversity trends in local marine and terrestrial habitats as well as a full investigation of the reasons for such losses and potential solutions to prevent, restore, or at least decrease them may lead to much-needed conservation policies. Biodiversity is crucial for supporting all species on Earth, as well as human activities and processes (Pörtner et al., 2023; Wei, 2021) [11,12]. The Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF, 2022) [13], regulating and promoting conservation actions over the next few decades, was recently approved by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD, 2022) [14]. The main GBF’s planned actions aim at restoring, maintaining, and enhancing 30% of the Earth’s land and oceans by 2030.

3.2. Urban Systems and Ecosystems: Dynamics and Functioning

Urban ecosystems show a very different structure and dynamic. Buildings, roads, and sidewalks, made with concrete, glass, and asphalt, not only cover and waterproof large areas through which water uses to reach underground storages and runoff patterns but also generate a temperature increase due to heat uptake by these construction materials. Further, combustion engine vehicles release CO₂, which spreads worldwide and places a heavy load on planetary climate, in spite of the partial uptake by (insufficient) urban and rural green areas. The latter are only partially able to host insects and other small animals (squirrels, birds, reptiles), which unavoidably translates into smaller biodiversity. Increased heat, increased chemicals released by vehicles, by house conditioning systems and other uses, and finally increased urban waste and wastewater affect urban populations through several kinds of diseases. Instead, renewable energies, expanded green areas, decreased use (and related transport) of market commodities, and increased reuse and recycling of goods to the largest possible extent may prevent temperature increase and toxicity in urban environments, in so saving their characteristics as appropriate human and biodiversity habitats.

4. Environmental Economics and Policy-Making

As global ecological and environmental problems continue to intensify, more and more people and policy makers have realized the importance of promoting global ecological protection, sustainable development, and environmental governance. However, most of them still pay more attention to the market value of resources than to environmental quality. While gaining more economic benefits, environmental sustainability is being disregarded. In spite of dominating Adam Smith’s “invisible hand of the market” concept (The Wealth of Nations, 1776; reprinted 1937) [15], theoretically allowing everybody to pursue individual own gain in so also promoting public interest, G. Hardin (1968) [16] pointed out a technological impossibility of preserving the commons due to uncontrolled population growth, while the Economics Nobel Prize winner E. Ostrom (1990) [17] underlined the need for community governance as the only way to prevent misuse, bypassing both centralized state control and market freedom. Ecologists H.T. Odum and E.P. Odum (2000) [18] reversed the dominating theories of value, pointing out that “Ecosystems of the world are threatened because market prices are used to evaluate them…When soils, wood, and other environmental products are abundant, they contribute the most, but market value is small. When environmental products are scarce, the market value is high.” Economic valuation, as currently practiced, allows for the unlimited exploitation and degradation of ecosystems. Unfortunately, the Odums’ reversed theory of value has not yet been understood nor accepted by stakeholders and policy-makers. Considering ecosystems as storages of market commodities (wood, sand, minerals, leather and, of course, energy) instead of common habitats increases their fragility and weakens efforts to understand their environmental value, biodiversity, and need for protection.

4.1. Shared Responsibility in Resource Use and Impact Generation

Increased world population, welfare, and technology generate increased resource use (mining, refining, industrial processing, transport, use and landfilling) and impacts (greenhouse gases, toxicological releases, freshwater depletion, land use, just to mention some). The impacts caused by additional extraction, transport, and use translate into less forests, less algae, less pollinators, and less biodiversity. Who is responsible for these additional impacts and how can they be monitored and decreased? The immediate way is to look at polluting processes, as a general trend; for example, pollution by iron mining and steel production as well as bauxite and aluminum may depend on excess mining and technological inefficiency (Conejo et al., 2020; UKGBC, 2025a; UKGBC, 2025b; WRI, 2024) [19,20,21,22]. However, it cannot be denied that increasing demand supporting improved lifestyles and increased population are also responsible for increased resource use impacts (Liu et al., 2020) [23].

Changed lifestyles, better technology and material recycling, decreased trade worldwide, and nature restoration (EU, 2024) [24] are only some of the possible options to take on the responsibility of impacts and solutions (as consumers, as enterprises, as governments).

4.2. Environmental Economics, Circular Economy: The Value of Natural Capital and Ecosystem Services

In the last few years, circular economy (CE) has been receiving increasing attention worldwide as a way to overcome the current production and consumption model based on continuous growth and increasing resource throughput (Ghisellini et al., 2016) [25]. By promoting the adoption of closing-the-loop production patterns within an economic system, CE aims to increase the efficiency of resource use, at the same time decreasing urban and industrial waste, to achieve a better balance and harmony between economy, environment, and society. In CE, the preventive design of societal structure is linked to the use of renewable resources (energy and materials) as well as to reuse and recycle patterns, leading to the longer life of goods, decreased demand for non-renewable resources and energy, and decreased pollution and economic costs, aiming to achieve regenerative eco-industrial and societal development: not a “more of the same” approach but rather radically alternative solutions to foresee new living and economic models much beyond present business-as-usual economy and resource management. Within a circular economy approach, the protection of and reliance on natural capital and ecosystems services (i.e., renewable materials and energies, support by biosphere through photosynthesis, wind, water, soil, and finally the richness of biodiversity for innovative production systems) are mandatory to ensure nature-based solutions, successful strategies, and shared well-being (NBS, 2025) [26].

4.3. Building on Environment Achievements

A large number of closed Special Issues (82) and still-open Special Issues (48) in Environments since 2014 to date (ENV, 2025) [27], with an approximate total number of 800 published papers, deal with water and wastewater treatment (24 Special Issues), agriculture and forestry (9), air pollution (15), environmental contaminants (9), energy (7), pollution by plastics (7), sustainable territories/environmental/urban systems (8), environmental accounting methods (12), soil (10), coastal and marine environment (8), noise (3), and waste management (5), among others (13, miscellaneous). This is already an undeniable huge result in terms of broad topic selection, not to talk of the other papers published outside of these Special Issues. What may still be improved on is the integration among the different topics and the design of strategies to improve the state of environmental systems, beyond the business-as-usual economic and technological processes.

5. Next Steps for Environments: Nature-Based Solutions

The scientific community grown around Environments is likely to contribute to increased knowledge regarding environmental systems, understanding of species interactions, and the implementation of nature-based solutions (IUCN, 2025; NBS, 2025) [26,28]. When talking of “solutions”, we mean addressing the problems related to the survival of species, by improving the nature around them, by learning from nature the appropriate patterns that allow for species survival, by understanding the way environmental systems interact to support each other and improve the quality of the habitat in which these species live (including humans), and increasing the environmental services to meet some of these species needs to prevent biodiversity decrease due to environmental degradation. As an example, we previously mentioned some of the services provided by urban trees as well as by pollinators, to which we are jointly indebted for allowing for the growth of most kinds of products, not only for the production of wood by trees and honey by bees.

Considering the four major categories of environmental services (provisioning, regulating, cultural, and supporting) identified by the United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA, 2005) [29], we may go deeper into the way environmental services operate. Provisioning services do not only mean food and natural gas but instead also refer to photosynthesis, drinking water, construction, textiles, and medical materials, among others. In a shared services framework, drinking water and photosynthesis also allow for the survival of other species, in turn helping humans with their products. In a similar manner, regulating, cultural, and supporting services provide suitable habitats to humans and other species. Improving environmental services allows us to identify nature-based solutions to address and potentially solve occurring problems. When, due to human economic activities, problems arise, nature-based solutions may be alternative options to technological ones. For example, in the case of the increased concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere due to excess fossil combustion, nature-based solutions may mean less combustion and at the same time implementing CO₂ uptake by planting trees, as an alternative to CO₂ capture and storage underground in deep reservoirs (Zhang et al., 2024) [30]. When freshwater is scarce or polluted, a nature-based solution means purifying wastewater by algae and bacteria to the maximum possible extent in order to release cleaner water to surface water bodies instead of using membrane bioreactors, reverse osmosis, and nanofiltration (Shamshad and Rehman, 2025) [31]. Further, topsoil degradation can be “nature-solved” by means of crop rotation, biological fertilizers, and re-forestation. In this regard, the European Union has recently approved a Nature Restoration Law (NRL, 2024) [32] to restore wetlands, rivers, forests, grasslands, marine ecosystems, and the species they host, increase biodiversity, restore environmental services and limit global warming. Following and enhancing this trend, Environments might host one or more Special Issues concerning different sectors of human activities (e.g., urban growth, agriculture, waste and wastewater treatment, among others) in order to call for deep and shared research on One Health (WHO, 2017, 2025; EU, 2025) [24,33,34] and nature-based solutions worldwide.

6. Concluding Remarks

For the sake of clarity, environmental systems most often jointly suffer from the same environmental degradation problems (e.g., climate change, loss of biodiversity, population increase, impacts of mineral extraction, soil erosion, deforestation, etc.), which cannot be dealt with separately but rather require a deep “one health” perspective, an integrated monitoring and assessment of the interaction among humans, the other species and the environment, and a clear investigation of the impacts of human activities and their mutual links. The results from this deeper and integrated investigation, most welcome in the pages of Environments, may be the basis for appropriate environmental policy making and nature-based solutions.