A note to me from their editor in chief:

"The journal is using a numeric reference style. References must be cited by numbers running consecutively in the text, e.g., ".. some studies have examined the influence of participation [1,2,3]" or "As Dawes et al. [4] point out ..". The References section should list the references in numeric order, i.e. in the order in which they first appear in the text. Before submitting the revised, final version of your paper please ensure that the manuscript follows the journal's numeric reference style"

Ive also checked the author guidelines and they match this ^,

Any chance the ERSS style can be modified?

IEEE does [1]-[3] instead of [1-3]: not sure that's actually closer in any way? And I thought otherwise the style was correct.
Again, though, have you actually checked that [1-3], which, to reiterate, is what the journal uses in publication, isn't actually acceptable? And if it isn't, what's supposed to happen with groups of 4 references? 10 references?

So adamsmith - whats the way forward here?

Hi everyone,

I am having a strange problem with this citation style: About 30 minutes ago, the style started to no longer display the short references in square brackets, but in parentheses. Also, in the bibliography, the square brackets have disappeared and the references are simply numbered + the dates are going wild-

Now it looks like this:

11. Moezzi M, Janda KB, Rotmann S. Using stories, narratives, and storytelling in energy and climate change research. Energy Research & Social Science. 2017 Sep;31:1–10.

I have been using this style for several weeks and everything was fine. I've tried to delete the style and import the latest version again, but nothing has changed. The downloaded file looks good to me, viewing it with a text editor, but already inside zotero's style editor (before using it in a word document) the problem appears.

Any idea what I did wrong?

We'll check, but FWIW, here's the previous style associated with the journal:
https://www.zotero.org/styles?q=id:elsevier-with-titles

(To be clear -- this really is 100% exactly the same style ERSS used previously; the old version of the style was just a link to this one)