Tenth Anniversary

This month marks 10 years since the first issue of Nature Climate Change. In this issue, we reflect on developments in research areas over those years and celebrate some memorable papers published in our pages.

To mark the tenth anniversary of Nature Climate Change, we asked a selection of researchers across the broad range of climate change disciplines to share their thoughts on notable developments of the past decade, as well as their hopes and expectations for the coming years of discovery.

In celebration of the tenth anniversary of Nature Climate Change, past and present editors reminisce about some of the papers that stood out.

Vehicle-emission standards for non-carbon-dioxide pollutants have recognized benefits for air quality. An interdisciplinary analysis now shows that adopting tight on-road emission standards for these pollutants would also mitigate short-term climate change and provide large benefits for human health and food security in a number of developing countries.

Using a comprehensive data set of thermal tolerance limits, latitudinal range boundaries and latitudinal range shifts of cold-blooded animals, this study explores the likely consequences of climate change for the geographical redistribution of terrestrial and marine species at a global scale.

Flood losses in coastal cities will rise due to increasing populations and assets. Research now quantifies average losses in the 136 largest coastal cities. Estimated at approximately US$6 billion in 2005, average annual losses could increase to US$52 billion by 2050 on the basis of projected socio-economic change alone. If climate change and subsidence are also considered, current protection will need to be upgraded to avoid unacceptable losses.

The slowdown in global average surface warming has recently been linked to sea surface cooling in the eastern Pacific Ocean. This work shows that strengthening trade winds caused a reduction in the 2012 global average surface air temperature of 0.1–0.2 °C. This may account for much of the warming hiatus and is a result of increased subsurface ocean heat uptake.

An application of network science reveals the institutional and corporate structure of the climate change counter-movement in the United States, while computational text analysis shows its influence in the news media and within political circles.

The northern Barents Sea has warmed rapidly in recent decades. Hydrographic observations suggest increases in ocean temperature—particularly after the mid-2000s—can be linked to reduced sea-ice import, freshwater loss, weakened stratification and increased upward heat fluxes from the deep Atlantic layer.

Between 2005 and 2015, several developed economies experienced decreases in CO₂ emissions. In this study, emissions in 18 countries are broken down and the potential effects of energy and climate policies on emission declines are explored.

Qualitative comparative analysis of 25 case studies across climate change hotspots in Africa and Asia shows that male migration and women’s poor working conditions combine with either institutional failure or poverty to constrain women’s agency, which limits their adaptive capacity.

Detection and attribution typically aims to find long-term climate signals in internal, often short-term variability. Here, common methods are extended to high-frequency temperature and humidity data, detecting instantaneous, global-scale climate change since 1999 for any year and 2012 for any day.

Snowmelt runoff is an important source of water for irrigating agricultural crops in high-mountain Asia, Central Asia, western Russia, western US and the southern Andes. Climate change places water resources in these basins at risk, indicating the need to adapt water management.

The authors use a subset of climate-associated genetic loci to predict future climate maladaptation for balsam poplar (Populus balsamifera) populations while also considering migration potential. They predict the greatest disruptions along the longitudinal edge of the species range.