The outbreak of COVID-19 quickly spread around the globe, with staggering infection and mortality rates. Given the reported benefits of greenness to human health, we hypothesized that greener neighbourhoods would suffer less from COVID-19 infection and severity than not. We modelled COVID-19 infection and severity in South Africa by fitting Generalized Linear Mixed Effects models to various socio-demographic and greenness data (EVI, i.e., Enhanced Vegetation Index, and tree and grass covers) collected from January 2020 to June 2022 at local municipalities, Wards, and districts scales. We found that income level showed a significant negative association with COVID-19 prevalence at the Ward level, suggesting that poorer neighbourhoods are more susceptible to COVID-19 infection. We also found that EVI and tree cover consistently showed a significant negative correlation with COVID-19 infection rate, irrespective of the scale of analysis, whereas grass cover showed a similar pattern but only at the Ward scale. Finally, we found that neither EVI, grass cover, nor tree cover showed a significant association with COVID-19 severity. Overall, greener neighbourhoods show greater resilience to the spread of COVID-19, suggesting that exposure to greenness may boost natural killer cells in the human body, thus reinvigorating our defence system against infections. Our results re-enforced the need to establish and preserve greens paces particularly in the developing world, given their ability to buffer the spread of COVID-19.

The COVID‐19 outbreak in 2020 resulted in rapidly rising infection rates with high associated mortality rates. In response, several epidemiological studies aimed to define ways in which the spread and severity of COVID‐19 can be curbed. As a result, there is a steady increase in the evidence linking greenspaces and COVID‐19 impact. However, the evidence of the benefits of greenspaces or greenness to human wellbeing in the context of COVID‐19 is fragmented and sometimes contradictory. This calls for a meta‐analysis of existing studies to clarify the matter. Here, we identified 621 studies across the world on the matter, which were then filtered down to 13 relevant studies for meta‐analysis, covering Africa, Asia, Europe, and the USA. These studies were meta‐analyzed, with the impacts of greenness on COVID‐19 infection rate quantified using regression estimates whereas impacts on mortality rates were measured using mortality rate ratios. We found evidence of significant negative correlations between greenness and both COVID‐19 infection and mortality rates. We further found that the impacts on COVID‐19 infection and related mortality are moderated by year of publication, greenness metrics, sample size, health and political covariates. This clarification has far‐reaching implications for policy development toward the establishment and management of green infrastructure for the benefit of human wellbeing.

Globally, issues related to desertification, land degradation, and drought (DLDD) are increasing, with a multitude of negative socioeconomic and ecological impacts reported. In particular, Africa is recognized as one of the regions that are most vulnerable to these negative impacts. In response, cross‐country collaborations to mitigate and build resiliency to DLDD are promoted, with the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification playing a central role. However, the scope of the current research landscape of scientific knowledge on DLDD in South Africa is unknown or not well documented, hampering well‐informed policy development and actions. Through a thorough synthesis of over 970 research outputs on DLDD from 1928 to 2024, we found that the generation of existing knowledge is mostly led by two African universities with heavy collaborations with the northern hemisphere. We also revealed a recent but steadily increasing research interest in DLDD in South Africa, with relatively more interest in drought than land degradation and desertification, while policy and land restoration are glaringly neglected. These results have pertinent policy and programmatic relevance in South Africa, as they can be used to enhance the scope and relevance of DLDD research to adequately inform the design and implementation of interventions in the local and regional contexts. Thus, the mitigation and adaptation to the impacts of DLDD would be enhanced.

The ongoing exponential growth of human population poses a risk to sustainable development goals (SDGs). Unless we understand the drivers of this growth and inform policy development accordingly, SDGs would remain a dream. One of the old theories of population growth known as the Malthusian theory predicts that resource availability drives population growth to a certain time when population growth outrun resource availability, leading to all sort of crises known as Malthusian crisis. Although the link between economic growth and population has been widely investigated while testing the theory, little is known about environmental and social factors po-tentially driving population growth. Here, because of various crises of our time recalling the Malthusian crisis, we revisited the theory by fitting structural equation models to environmental, social and economic data collected over 30-year period in South Africa. None of the social varia-bles tested predicts population growth. Instead, we found that biodiversity (species protection index) correlates positively with population growth. Biodiversity provides various resources through ecosystem goods and services to human, thus supporting population growth as pre-dicted in the Malthusian theory. However, we also found that this population growth may lead to conservation conflict as we found that biodiversity habitat (wetland area) correlates negatively with population growth, thus raising the compromising effect of population growth on life on earth. What’s more, we found a significant link between economic growth measured as GDP and population growth, further supporting the Malthusian prediction. Overall, our study re-affirms the value of biodiversity to human and suggests that the Malthusian theory should continuously be tested with predictors other than economic.