Climate-change policy articles within Nature Geoscience

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  • Article |

    Emission controls avoided some 870,000 deaths in China between 2002 and 2017 but further air quality improvements need energy-climate policies and changed economic structure, according to index decomposition analysis and chemical transport models.

    • Guannan Geng
    • , Yixuan Zheng
    •  & Steven J. Davis

  • Comment |

    Scientists and policymakers must acknowledge that carbon dioxide removal can be small in scale and still be relevant for climate policy, that it will primarily emerge ‘bottom up’, and that different methods have different governance needs.

    • Rob Bellamy
    •  & Oliver Geden

  • News & Views |

    If emissions continue at the present-day rate, about 22 years are left until global mean warming reaches the 1.5 °C Paris Agreement target, suggests a new metric based on the observed level and rate of anthropogenic warming.

    • Katarzyna B. Tokarska

  • Comment |

    The remaining carbon budget consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 °C allows 20 more years of current emissions according to one study, but is already exhausted according to another. Both are defensible. We need to move on from a unique carbon budget, and face the nuances.

    • Glen P. Peters

  • Comment |

    Upward estimates for carbon budgets are unlikely to lead to action-focused climate policy. Climate researchers need to understand processes and incentives in policymaking and politics to communicate effectively.

    • Oliver Geden

  • Comment |

    Temperature overshoot scenarios that make the 1.5 °C climate target feasible could turn into sources of political flexibility. Climate scientists must provide clear constraints on overshoot magnitude, duration and timing, to ensure accountability.

    • Oliver Geden
    •  & Andreas Löschel

  • Commentary |

    The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is preparing a report on keeping global warming below 1.5 °C. How the panel chooses to deal with the option of solar geoengineering will test the integrity of scientific climate policy advice.

    • Andy Parker
    •  & Oliver Geden

  • Commentary |

    The Paris Agreement introduced three mitigation targets. In the future, the main focus should not be on temperature targets such as 2 or 1.5 °C, but on the target with the greatest potential to effectively guide policy: net zero emissions.

    • Oliver Geden

  • Editorial |

    The Paris Agreement on climate change has shifted international focus to more stringent mitigation, and asked the scientific community to work out what that means on a tight timeline. The challenge is steep, but well worth a go.

  • Commentary |

    The adoption of the Paris Agreement is a historic milestone for the global response to the threat of climate change. Scientists are now being challenged to investigate a 1.5 °C world — which will require an accelerated effort from the geoscience community.

    • Joeri Rogelj
    •  & Reto Knutti

  • News & Views |

    Humanity's nitrogen pollution footprint has increased by a factor of six since the 1930s. A global analysis reveals that a quarter of this nitrogen pollution is associated with the production of internationally traded products.

    • James N. Galloway
    •  & Allison M. Leach

  • Editorial |

    As the world's leaders are negotiating climate change mitigation in Paris, a strong El Niño brings the warmest year on record. After a decade and a half of slow warming and slow policy progress, 2015 may bring an acceleration of both.

  • Commentary |

    Some climate change impacts rise fast with little warming, and then taper off. To avoid diminishing incentives to reduce emissions and inadvertently slipping into a lower-welfare world, mitigation policy needs to be ambitious early on.

    • Katharine L. Ricke
    • , Juan B. Moreno-Cruz
    •  & Ken Caldeira

  • Commentary |

    In the absence of an enforceable set of commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, concerned citizens may want to supplement international agreements on climate change. We suggest that litigation could have an important role to play.

    • James Thornton
    •  & Howard Covington

  • Perspective |

    Many governments agreed to limit global mean temperature change to below 2 °C, yet this level has not been assessed scientifically. A synthesis of the literature suggests that temperature is the best available target quantity, but a safe level is uncertain.

    • Reto Knutti
    • , Joeri Rogelj
    •  & Erich M. Fischer

  • Editorial |

    The International Year of Soils draws attention to our vital dependence on the fertile crumb beneath our feet. Soil is renewable, but it takes careful stewardship to keep it healthy and plentiful.

  • Commentary |

    Multi-actor integrated assessment models based on well-being concepts beyond GDP could support policymakers by highlighting the interrelation of climate change mitigation and other important societal problems.

    • Klaus Hasselmann
    • , Roger Cremades
    •  & Nick Winder

  • Perspective |

    Our understanding of the interactions between clouds, circulation and climate is limited. Four central research questions — now tractable through advances in models, concepts and observations — are proposed to accelerate future progress.

    • Sandrine Bony
    • , Bjorn Stevens
    •  & Mark J. Webb

  • Editorial |

    Humans have altered their environment ever since they first appeared. Updates on three frameworks of thinking about the scale of twenty-first-century human influence on the Earth are invigorating the global change debate.

  • Editorial |

    Guidance for mitigation action should come from the insights that global mean temperatures respond to cumulative carbon emissions and that there are risks beyond warming alone. Momentum for the negotiations requires a sense of opportunity.

  • Commentary |

    In areas of the developing world that have benefited only marginally from the intensification of agriculture, foreign investments can enhance productivity. This could represent a step towards greater food security, but only if we ensure that malnourished people in the host countries benefit.

    • Paolo D'Odorico
    •  & Maria Cristina Rulli

  • Commentary |

    Crops are at risk in a changing climate. Farmers in the developing world will be able to insure against harvest failure if robust insurance packages, based on a geophysical index rather than individual loss, become widely available.

    • Molly E. Brown
    • , Daniel E. Osgood
    •  & Miguel A. Carriquiry

  • Commentary |

    Accusations by sceptics have steered climate researchers into an unproductive battle. They should now rise above the debate and help develop models of the coupled climate–socioeconomic system to advise policymakers.

    • Klaus Hasselmann

  • Commentary |

    Science has successfully established the discussion of climate change in the global arena. Following the Copenhagen crisis in climate policy, attention needs to be shifted from global goals to societally relevant, local and pragmatic countermeasures.

    • Werner Krauss

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