Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
Maternal exposure to ambient heat during pregnancy has been shown to increase the risk for several adverse birth outcomes. Now research reveals that variations of ambient temperature during pregnancy and childhood could have a long-term impact on a child’s brain development.
Using magnetic resonance imaging assessment of 2,681 children from the Netherlands, the authors investigate effects of cold and heat exposure during pregnancy, infancy and childhood. They found that these exposures can have lasting impacts on white matter microstructure at preadolescence.
Hydrochlorofluorocarbons are important ozone-depleting substances. Here the authors show that the radiative forcing and equivalent effective chlorine from hydrochlorofluorocarbons has decreased in recent years, 5 years earlier than expected.
Carbon dioxide removal is an important part of climate mitigation pathways. However, its planning and implementation should be carefully reviewed given the potential limitations and risks.
In a global-scale study, we investigated the contribution of individual and multiple global change stressors to soil carbon variables, which revealed that an increasing number of global change stressors will reduce the amount of carbon in soils, challenging their capacity to mitigate climate change.
Moving towards net-zero emissions requires carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies, which bring environmental and socioeconomic risks. This study reveals that demand and technological interventions in hard-to-abate sectors help to achieve net-zero targets with less reliance on CDR.
Soil carbon storage is vulnerable to various climatic and anthropogenic global change stressors (for example drought, warming, land-use intensification). Here the authors show that multiple stress factors act simultaneously to reduce soil carbon storage and persistence across global biomes.
The authors quantify how climate change-related disturbances—drought, fires and insect outbreaks—impact the sensitivity of primary productivity to subsequent water stress. They show significant increases in sensitivity following drought and fire, leading to decreased terrestrial carbon uptake.
A comprehensive analysis of observations and model simulations finds that future global mean warming is likely to be larger than previously thought, and that limiting global warming to well below 2°C will be more difficult than previously anticipated.
Internal variability can strongly influence global temperature trends. Here the authors show that if the internal variability in the eastern tropical Pacific is removed from recent trends, the constrained projected warming with future CO2 emissions is higher than currently expected.
The material-intensive transition to low-carbon energy will impose environmental and social burdens on local and regional communities. Demand-side strategies can help to achieve higher well-being at lower levels of energy or material use, and an interdisciplinary approach in future research is essential.
It has been postulated that there is a threshold temperature above which permafrost will reach a global tipping point, causing accelerated thaw and global collapse. Here it is argued that permafrost-thaw feedbacks are dominated by local- to regional-scale processes, but this also means there is no safety margin.
The authors use a mechanistic microclimate model to model the below-canopy conditions for 300,000 tropical forest locations across 30 years. They show that small temperature increases have already resulted in novel temperature regimes across most sites, and highlight areas that may act as refugia.
Long-term monitoring is required to determine whether climate change is having an impact on shallow geohazard frequency and magnitude; however, these records rarely exist. An innovative approach, using tree damage as evidence, suggests climate change has shifted the seasonality of alpine rockfalls as well as increasing their frequency and volume.