Nature 481, 321–328 (2012)

In the ‘Natural and anthropogenic climatic variation’ section of this Review, we incorrectly referred to the North Atlantic Oscillation as a contributor to the 2005 Amazonian droughts. We should instead have referred to the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, which is an oceanic phenomenon related to anomalies in sea surface temperature in the tropical north Atlantic Ocean and can affect drought in the Amazon Basin. We thank L. Aragao for drawing this error to our attention. This has been corrected in the PDF and HTML versions online.