Without rapid changes to agriculture and food systems, the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change will not be met. Food systems are one of the most important contributors to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but they also need to be adapted to cope with climate change impacts. Although many options exist to reduce GHG emissions in the food system, efforts to develop implementable transformation pathways are hampered by a combination of structural challenges such as fragmented decision-making, vested interests, and power imbalances in the climate policy and food communities, all of which are compounded by a lack of joint vision. New processes and governance arrangements are urgently needed for dealing with potential trade-offs among mitigation options and their food security implications.

The imperative to measure progress towards Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has resulted in a proliferation of targets and indicators fed by an ever-expanding set of observations. This proliferation undermines one principal purpose of the SDGs: to provide a framework for coordinated action across policy domains. Systems approaches to defining Essential Variables have focused monitoring of climate, biodiversity and oceans and offer opportunities to coordinate SDG monitoring. We propose four criteria and a process to identify Essential SDG Variables (ESDGVs), which will highlight interactions and gaps in current monitoring. The ESDGV criteria suggest a research agenda to: develop and test interdisciplinary system models; test transformations theory for sustainable development; analyse policy interactions; and formulate models to support further refinements of ESDGVs and SDG monitoring

Non-technical summary: We identify a set of essential recent advances in climate change research with high policy relevance, across natural and social sciences: (1) looming inevitability and implications of overshooting the 1.5°C warming limit, (2) urgent need for a rapid and managed fossil fuel phase-out, (3) challenges for scaling carbon dioxide removal, (4) uncertainties regarding the future contribution of natural carbon sinks, (5) intertwinedness of the crises of biodiversity loss and climate change, (6) compound events, (7) mountain glacier loss, (8) human immobility in the face of climate risks, (9) adaptation justice, and (10) just transitions in food systems. Technical summary: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Reports provides the scientific foundation for international climate negotiations and constitutes an unmatched resource for researchers. However, the assessment cycles take multiple years. As a contribution to cross- and interdisciplinary understanding of climate change across diverse research communities, we have streamlined an annual process to identify and synthesize significant research advances. We collected input from experts on various fields using an online questionnaire and prioritized a set of 10 key research insights with high policy relevance. This year, we focus on: (1) the looming overshoot of the 1.5°C warming limit, (2) the urgency of fossil fuel phase-out, (3) challenges to scale-up carbon dioxide removal, (4) uncertainties regarding future natural carbon sinks, (5) the need for joint governance of biodiversity loss and climate change, (6) advances in understanding compound events, (7) accelerated mountain glacier loss, (8) human immobility amidst climate risks, (9) adaptation justice, and (10) just transitions in food systems. We present a succinct account of these insights, reflect on their policy implications, and offer an integrated set of policy-relevant messages. This science synthesis and science communication effort is also the basis for a policy report contributing to elevate climate science every year in time for the United Nations Climate Change Conference. Social media summary: We highlight recent and policy-relevant advances in climate change research – with input from more than 200 experts.

Global Environmental Assessments (GEAs) are in a unique position to influence environmental decision-making in the context of sustainability challenges. To do this effectively, however, new methods are needed to respond to the needs of decision-makers for a more integrated, contextualized and goal-seeking evaluation of different policies, geared for action from global to local. While scenarios are an important tool for GEAs to link short-term decisions and medium and long-term consequences, these current information needs cannot be met only through deductive approaches focused on the global level. In this paper, we argue that a more diverse set of futures tools operating at multiple scales are needed to improve GEA scenario development and analysis to meet the information needs of policymakers and other stakeholders better. Based on the literature, we highlight four challenges that GEAs need to be able to address in order to contribute to global environmental decision-making about the future: 1. anticipate unpredictable future conditions; 2. be relevant at multiple scales, 3. include diverse actors, perspectives and contexts; and 4. leverage the imagination to inspire action. We present a toolbox of future-oriented approaches and methods that can be used to effectively address the four challenges currently faced by GEAs.

The unpredictable Anthropocene poses the challenge of imagining a radically different, equitable and sustainable world. Looking 100 years ahead is not easy, and especially as millennials, it appears quite bleak. This paper is the outcome of a visioning exercise carried out in a 2-day workshop, attended by 33 young early career professionals under the auspices of IPBES. The process used Nature Futures Framework in an adapted visioning method from the Seeds of Good Anthropocene project. Four groups envisioned more desirable future worlds; where humanity has organised itself, the economy, politics and technology, to achieve improved nature-human well-being. The four visions had differing conceptualisations of this future. However, there were interesting commonalities in their leverage points for transformative change, including an emphasis on community, fundamentally different economic systems based on sharing and technological solutions to foster sustainability and human-nature connectedness. Debates included questioning the possibility of maintaining local biocultural diversity with increased connectivity globally and the prominence of technology for sustainability outcomes. These visions are the first step towards a wider galvanisation of youth visions for a brighter future, which is often missing in the arena where it can be taken seriously, to trigger more transformative pathways towards meeting global goals