Climate-change policy articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Global public expectations for carbon removal governance are: engagement beyond acceptance research; regulating industry beyond incentivizing innovation; systemic coordination; and prioritizing underlying and interrelated causes of unsustainability.

    • Sean Low
    • , Livia Fritz
    •  & Benjamin K. Sovacool

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Setting goals that are context-specific, relevant, and collectively shared is critical in adaptation. As necessary elements in target setting, imaginaries for adaptation and the language connected to them remain vague. Visuals produced through art-science collaborations can be great allies to (de)construct imaginaries and deglobalise discourses of adaptation.

    • Marta Olazabal
    • , Maria Loroño-Leturiondo
    •  & Josune Urrutia

  • Perspective
    | Open Access

    Engineering biology is a dynamic field that uses gene editing, synthesis, assembly, and engineering to design new or modified biological systems. Here the authors discuss the policy considerations and interventions needed to support a role for engineering biology in climate change mitigation.

    • Jonathan Symons
    • , Thomas A. Dixon
    •  & Isak S. Pretorius

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The global atlas of unburnable oil shows that the most socio-environmentally sensitive areas, such as protected areas or biodiversity hotspots, need to be kept entirely off-limits to oil extraction in order to keep global warming under 1.5 °C.

    • Lorenzo Pellegrini
    • , Murat Arsel
    •  & Martí Orta-Martínez

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study demonstrates how land-based carbon removals and the market-mediated responses are sensitive to mitigation policy strength and scope, illustrating that, despite trade-offs, both forestation and BECCS are integral to cost-effective 2 °C pathways.

    • Xin Zhao
    • , Bryan K. Mignone
    •  & Haewon C. McJeon

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The coal chemical sector uses coal to produce chemicals and emits substantial greenhouse gases, which are hard to abate by electrification alone. Deploying green H2 for China’s coal chemical plants can reduce ~50% of emissions at a low cost.

    • Yang Guo
    • , Liqun Peng
    •  & Denise L. Mauzerall

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The estimates of the societal costs of carbon currently used for policy evaluations may be too low due to an insufficient representation of tropical cyclone damage. Accounting for them substantially increases the estimated benefits of climate change mitigation measures.

    • Hazem Krichene
    • , Thomas Vogt
    •  & Christian Otto

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A paper led by Prof. Zhang evaluates the value chain carbon footprints of Chinese listed companies. The results could encourage collaborative climate actions along value chains and help investors understand the environmental impacts of their investment.

    • Zengkai Zhang
    • , Jiaoyan Li
    •  & Dabo Guan

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Financing of urban greening has traditionally prioritized economic growth. Here the authors argue for action to ensure more socially just green financing.

    • Melissa García-Lamarca
    • , Isabelle Anguelovski
    •  & Kayin Venner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A new study reports survey-experimental results suggesting that multilateral approaches to climate action increase domestic carbon tax approval. The appeal of multilateralism reflects improved sustainability beliefs about effectiveness, fairness, and reciprocity.

    • Michael M. Bechtel
    • , Kenneth F. Scheve
    •  & Elisabeth van Lieshout

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Charging costs are important for the diffusion of electric vehicles as required to decarbonize transport. Here, the authors show large variance of electrical vehicle charging costs across 30 European countries and charging options, suggesting different policy options to reduce charging costs.

    • Lukas Lanz
    • , Bessie Noll
    •  & Bjarne Steffen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A new study characterizes adaptation in mitigation pathways, and shows that climate adaptation can lead to higher energy demand, power system costs and carbon prices, with mitigation’s benefits compensating decarbonization costs.

    • Francesco Pietro Colelli
    • , Johannes Emmerling
    •  & Enrica De Cian

  • Article
    | Open Access

    New study finds geographical mismatch in cross-regional ranking between cost and benefit of carbon mitigation, as well as spatial mismatch between relative suitability of mitigation and mitigation ambition of emitters.

    • Yu Liu
    • , Mingxi Du
    •  & Klaus Hubacek

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The relationship between new greenspaces and gentrification is an important one for urbanization. Here the authors show a positive relationship for at least one decade between greening in the 1990s–2000s and gentrification that occurred between 2000–2016 in 17 of 28 studied cities in North America and Europe.

    • Isabelle Anguelovski
    • , James J. T. Connolly
    •  & Joaquin Martinez Minaya

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A new study shows that tropical silvopasture systems can provide significant cooling services for local communities, and identifies where these silvopasture systems can most effectively counteract global climate change to help communities adapt to warming.

    • Lucas R. Vargas Zeppetello
    • , Susan C. Cook-Patton
    •  & Yuta J. Masuda

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Vegetation changes have been suggested as a climate mitigation option, but the numerous feedbacks between vegetation and climate are not well understood. Here, the authors show that greening leads to surface cooling in many areas, but the size of the effect depends on the background climate.

    • Ramdane Alkama
    • , Giovanni Forzieri
    •  & Alessandro Cescatti

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Public acceptability of carbon taxation is vital for its implementation. Here, the authors show that spending all revenues on climate projects, rather than mixing them, is the most acceptable policy, while information provision only increases acceptability for a carbon tax with unspecified revenues.

    • Sara Maestre-Andrés
    • , Stefan Drews
    •  & Jeroen van den Bergh

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Comprehensive policy measures are needed to close the emissions gap between Nationally Determined Contributions and emissions goals of the Paris Agreement. Here the authors present a Bridge scenario that may aid in closing the emissions gap by 2030.

    • Heleen L. van Soest
    • , Lara Aleluia Reis
    •  & Detlef P. van Vuuren

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Current carbon accounting and reporting practices remain unsystematic and incomparable, particularly for emissions along the value chain (scope 3). Here the authors present a framework to harmonize scope 3 emissions by accounting for reporting inconsistency, boundary incompleteness, and activity exclusion.

    • Lena Klaaßen
    •  & Christian Stoll

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Climate change is expected to have impacts on human mortality, e.g. through increases in heat waves. Here, the author proposes a new metric to account for excess deaths from additional CO2 emissions, which allows to assess the mortality impacts of marginal emissions and leads to a substantial increase in the social costs of carbon.

    • R. Daniel Bressler

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Access to low cost finance is vital for developing economies’ transition to green energy. Here the authors show how modelled decarbonization pathways for developing economies are disproportionately impacted by different weighted average cost of capital (WACC) assumptions.

    • Nadia Ameli
    • , Olivier Dessens
    •  & Michael Grubb

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Afforestation is an important greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation strategy but the efficacy of commercial (harvested) forestry is disputed. Here the authors apply dynamic life cycle assessment to show that new commercial conifer forests can achieve up to 269% more GHG mitigation than semi-natural forests, over 100 years.

    • Eilidh J. Forster
    • , John R. Healey
    •  & David Styles

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ambitious climate policies can negatively impact the global poor by affecting income, food and energy prices. Here, the authors quantify this effect, and show that it can be compensated by national redistribution of the carbon pricing revenues in combination with international climate finance.

    • Bjoern Soergel
    • , Elmar Kriegler
    •  & Alexander Popp

  • Perspective
    | Open Access

    Negative emission technologies are central to avoiding catastrophic climate change. Deploying engineered solutions such as direct air capture requires a policy sequencing strategy that focuses on “incentives + mandates” in early adopters, while creating positive spillovers that incentivize follower countries to take policy action.

    • Jonas Meckling
    •  & Eric Biber

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