Environmental Science: Advances Blog

Urgent action is needed to combat the climate emergency and associated impacts – and across the world, our community are collaborating to address UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

We have put together a collection of leading content on marine litter and microplastics from across our energy and environmental science journals. This diverse collection features work on the detection of microplastics in water, their fate and mitigation pathways– vital information that will help us to combat climate change and address SDG14.

Read on to discover this exciting collection, featuring:

Fluorogenic hyaluronan nanogels for detection of micro- and nanoplastics in water by Luca Prodi, Damiano Genovese et al. Environ. Sci.: Nano, 2022,9, 582-588

The fate of plastic in the ocean environment – a minireview by Helge Niemann et al. Environ. Sci.: Processes Impacts, 2021,23, 198-212

Microplastics in ecosystems: their implications and mitigation pathways by Manjusri Misra and Amar K. Mohanty et al .Environ. Sci.: Adv., 2022,1, 9-29

Join us in tackling the climate crisis

Contribute to our cross-journal collection showcasing research advancing UN SDGs

The principles of the UN SDGs align closely with our own – to help the chemical science community make the world a better place. So that we can achieve this, we are curating a cross-journal collection across our energy and environmental science journals.

This collection will cover studies which advance our understanding of the climate situation, and present new technologies & innovations to combat climate change – inclusive of environmental engineering, materials science, energy science disciplines and beyond.

We invite you to publish your next paper in this collection – quote ‘XXSDGN1422’ when submitting your manuscript. You can put your trust in both our rigorous peer review process and fast times to publication – which are less than 9 weeks after submission across all our journals.

If you have some exciting results to publish on these topics, we would be delighted to hear from you – we are also very happy to guide you on which RSC journal would be the most appropriate for your paper.

We are delighted to be sharing with you recent Advance Articles from Environmental Science: Advances.

Environmental Science: Advances is an interdisciplinary, gold open access journal that publishes advances in all areas related to environmental sustainability. The journal welcomes and celebrates research that contributes to our understanding of the environment, and to the advancement of several UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Read our recent Advance Articles now

We have recently accepted several papers across the full spectrum of environmental science, ranging from insights into coccolithophore electrochemistry to pollutant emissions and implications for policy. Read on to hear from one of our authors, Richard Compton, about their work.

Single-entity coccolithophore electrochemistry shows size is no guide to the degree of calcification

Richard Compton et al.

Environ. Sci.: Adv., 2022, Advance Article

DOI: 10.1039/D2VA00025C

Professor Richard Compton on the work: Marine phytoplankton play a crucial but largely unexplored role in the global carbon cycle sequestering in excess of 10¹⁵ g of CaCO₃ to the deep ocean each year. This is directly comparable to the flux of carbon dioxide released by mankind. Plankton in the ocean play at least as important a role as do trees on land in fixing carbon dioxide!

Data, essential for realistic climate models, on the calcium carbonate content of plankton populations has hitherto been limited to sampling followed by wet chemistry or crude estimates via 2-dimensional microscopy imaging.

Our paper shows how electrochemistry can be used to provide a high throughput single entity measurement of particulate inorganic carbon and reports that different coccolithophores, E.huxleyi, G.oceanica and C.baarudii have widely different CaCO₃ masses ranging over three orders of magnitude from 2.6 pg to 8.3 ng per plankton, and that surprisingly within a species the calcium carbonate content is NOT related to the cell size.

The implication is that the speciation of plankton populations must be monitored not simply their extent such as results from the commonly used satellite monitoring of plankton fluorescence.

The work, a collaboration between Oxford Chemistry and Earth Sciences, entitled Monitoring Ocean Ecosystems,  is supported by the Oxford Martin School (https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/programmes/ ) and is also addressing the use of electrochemistry for easy plankton speciation sensing. 

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Urgent action is needed to combat the climate emergency and associated impacts – and across the world, our community are collaborating to address UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

We have put together a collection of leading content on clean water and sanitation from across our energy and environmental science journals. This diverse collection features work on wastewater treatment and disinfection, water resource recovery and monitoring water quality – vital technologies that will help us to improve access to sustainable water for all and address SDG 6.

Read on to discover this exciting collection, featuring:

Opportunities for nanotechnology to enhance electrochemical treatment of pollutants in potable water and industrial wastewater – a perspective by Paul Westerhoff et al.

The potential contribution of urine source separation to the SDG agenda – a review of the progress so far and future development options by Tove A. Larsen et al.

A case study on tap water quality in large buildings recommissioned after extended closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic by Maryam Salehi et al.

A flexible copper sulfide composite membrane with tunable plasmonic resonance absorption for near-infrared light-driven seawater desalination by Zhenmin Xu, Shiping Yang, Zhenfeng Bian et al.

Join us in tackling the climate crisis and contribute to our cross-journal collection showcasing research advancing UN SDGs

The principles of the UN SDGs align closely with our own – to help the chemical science community make the world a better place. So that we can achieve this, we are curating a cross-journal collection across our energy and environmental science journals.

This collection will cover studies which advance our understanding of the climate situation, and present new technologies & innovations to combat climate change – inclusive of environmental engineering, materials science, energy science disciplines and beyond.

We invite you to publish your next paper in this collection – quote ‘XXSDG0622’ when submitting your manuscript. You can put your trust in both our rigorous peer review process and fast times to publication – which are less than 9 weeks after submission across all our journals.

If you have some exciting results to publish on these topics, we would be delighted to hear from you – we are also very happy to guide you on which RSC journal would be the most appropriate for your paper.

Submit your manuscript to the collection