Microbes and climate change

To coincide with the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28), taking place in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, we present a set of specially commissioned commentary and review articles that call attention to the outsized impact of microbes on the environment.

Climate changes can destabilize soil microbial communities, but compound and sequential extreme climate events will magnify the destabilizing effects to other trophic levels — thereby impacting terrestrial biodiversity and ecosystem functioning.

The spread of vector-borne infectious diseases is driven by a complex array of environmental and social drivers, including climate and land-use changes. Global and regional action is urgently needed to tackle carbon emissions and deforestation to halt future outbreaks.

The unprecedented extent of highly pathogenic avian influenza coincides with intensifying global climate changes that alter host ecology and physiology, and could impact virus evolution and dynamics.

The Nagoya Protocol was drafted to ensure the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the international use of genetic resources, but the lack of unified procedures and unclear definitions relating to microorganisms present considerable hurdles to microbiology research.

Increased heat tolerance in fungi with pathogenic potential due to global warming could bring new fungal diseases.

Critical thresholds are abrupt changes in ecosystems triggered by environmental disturbances, which can be used to assess resilience and vulnerability. Here, we propose how a trait-based approach could be used to harness the predictive power of microbial dynamics to manage ecosystem response to environmental changes.

Here the authors review how microbial metabolism could offer greener options for the synthesis and breakdown of plastic monomers and polymers.

Studying the ocean microbiome can inform international policies related to ocean governance, tackling climate change, ocean acidification and pollution, and can help promote achievement of multiple Sustainable Development Goals.

Efforts to futureproof global microbial biodiversity are proposed, in particular in managed landscapes, to monitor, manage and restore the soil fungal microbiome.

Careful and responsible microbiome management is a critical strategy to counter biodiversity loss, but practical and regulatory hurdles must be addressed to maximize its utility.

An integrated science–policy–society interface that explicitly considers soil microbiomes is needed to achieve One Health goals.

Resilience of freshwater microbial communities to flooding is revealed by high-resolution in situ sampling experiments in a forest pond during two extreme rain events.

Statistical mapping techniques provide insights into the current geographical spread of the mosquito-borne dengue virus infection and predict changes in the areas that will be environmentally suitable to the virus for the years 2020, 2050 and 2080.

Monkeypox is caused by an emerging zoonotic virus. This study describes a detailed investigation into monkeypox outbreaks in chimpanzees through non-invasive environmental sampling, virus genomics, pathology, behavioural ecology and dietary metabarcoding.

White-tailed deer are a potential reservoir of SARS-CoV-2 variants.

Soil microbes control the cycling of carbon, but how these communities will respond to climate changes is unknown. Here, 7 years of artificial warming decreased microbial richness and diversity, driven mostly by soil moisture loss.

Wildfires have unknown impacts on soil microbes and biogeochemistry. Using metagenomics across forest burn gradients, here the authors show severity-dependent losses in microbiome diversity and functional shifts that underpin post-fire survival.

Tropical forests store vast amounts of carbon that might be liberated as temperatures increase. A 2-year experiment of tropical forest soil warming reveals that microbial diversity is reduced, but enzyme activity is increased, resulting in CO₂ emissions threefold greater than modelling predicts.

Isotopic labelling and multi-omics experiments conducted in Biosphere 2 show how dry conditions reprogramme microbial metabolism.

Understanding the mechanisms and evolution of pathogenicity in fungi will bring us a step closer to reducing the annual toll of 1.6 million deaths from fungal disease.

Fungi from the Neocallimastigomycetes taxonomic class break bonds in lignin during the anaerobic deconstruction of whole plant cell walls. This finding challenges the paradigm that only certain aerobic organisms break down lignin.

Using genome-resolved metagenomics for 41 Arctic seawater samples, this ecogenomic analysis of 530 metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) from the polar Arctic Ocean reveals uncultured Arctic bacterial and archaeal MAGs, their gene expression patterns, habitat preferences and metabolic potential.