Acknowledgment to the Reviewers of Journal of Environmental & Earth Sciences in 2025
2026-02-06
Earth’s New Horizon: Innovations in Ecological Development and Environmental Preservation
Authors
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Haitao Wang
Wuhan Zhihuiyuan Environmental Technology Co., Ltd., Wuhan 430200, China
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Xuan Zhang
Wuhan Zhihuiyuan Environmental Technology Co., Ltd., Wuhan 430200, China
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Zhaojun Wu
Wuhan Zhihuiyuan Environmental Technology Co., Ltd., Wuhan 430200, China
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.30564/jees.v8i1.12988Abstract
The environment and its preservation are becoming more and more dependent on ecological development in an age of accelerating climate risk, biodiversity loss, and pressures of pollution. This review summarizes the frontiers of innovation that are capable of enhancing integration of human development and ecological integrity, and how the interaction between technical, ecological, and institutional innovations can produce real-world results. We initially discuss developing ecological innovations that offer new opportunities to urban development, such as low-impact cities, ecological infrastructure, clean energy transitions, and biodiversity-informed siting, and digital decision-support systems enhancing planning and resource efficiency. Then, we evaluate progress in the field of preservation and restoration, with a particular focus on nature-based solutions, a process-based approach to restoration science, connectivity conservation, and a watershed-scale and seascape-scale approach to restore resilience and help recover biodiversity. In these spheres, we discover measurement, monitoring, and verification (MRV), one of the main pillars of scale alongside remote sensing, automated field monitoring, environmental Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA), and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled analytics, increasing the range of trackable and manageable indices as well as creating new issues with baselines, uncertainty, and data ethics. Lastly, we compare governance, finance, and equity as key conversion processes that can turn innovations into sustainable dividends with authenticity principles, however, of additionality, permanence, and leakage avoidance, and with rights-based and redistributive mechanisms and approaches that reinforce legitimacy. We end by providing a portfolio roadmap of prioritization of the interventions that have high co-benefits and the identification of critical research and institutional gaps to provide net-positive ecological results.
Keywords:
Ecological Development; Environmental Preservation; Nature-Based Solutions; MRV; Circular EconomyReferences
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Wang, H., Zhang, X., & Wu, Z. (2026). Earth’s New Horizon: Innovations in Ecological Development and Environmental Preservation. Journal of Environmental & Earth Sciences, 8(1), 298–323. https://doi.org/10.30564/jees.v8i1.12988
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Copyright © 2026 Haitao Wang, Xuan Zhang, Zhaojun Wu
This is an open access article under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License.
