Research in support of COP26

Nature Climate Change talks to Felipe C. Mandarino, city information coordinator within the Rio de Janeiro city government, Brazil, about building cooperation, facing data and knowledge gaps and responding to climate change in Brazilian cities.

Climate action is needed across the Global South, with just transition the central priority. Nature Climate Change spoke to Maisa Rojas, associate professor at the University of Chile, about Chile’s progress in climate governance and the challenges ahead, as well as the opportunities with COP26.

As the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow nears, calls for politicians to heed the warnings on climate change increase. We talked to Atte Harjanne, a member of parliament in Finland, to hear how some politicians are trying to incorporate scientific findings in their decisions.

Dr Shailja Vaidya Gupta is Senior Adviser at the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India. She tells Nature Sustainability about the challenges of climate negotiations from her country’s perspective, views are her own.

A global energy system model finds that planned fossil fuel extraction is inconsistent with limiting global warming to 1.5 °C, because the majority of fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground.

Personal carbon allowances (PCAs) could support climate mitigation efforts but would need to be carefully designed to avoid impacts on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This Perspective discusses why the time is ripe for reconsidering PCAs and provides a set of SDG-based design principles for the future adoption of PCAs.

During a period of drought, an intact tropical peatland in Indonesia released half the amount of greenhouse gases as was released from a degraded site, according to a direct comparison of eddy covariance measurements at a pair of peatland sites in Sumatra.

Aviation contributes to climate change and ways to reduce its emissions are widely debated. Here, the authors assess the effects of technology improvements and the use of sustainable aviation fuels and find that even when these are considered aviation is unlikely to meet emissions goals in line with the Paris Agreement.

Nature-based climate solutions can help meet climate mitigation goals, but estimates of their carbon storage potential vary. This Review discusses the constraints and potential contributions of increasing carbon storage in the terrestrial biosphere, suggesting a conservative estimate of 100–200 GtCO₂ in negative emissions to 2100.

Established climate mitigation modelling relies on controversial negative emissions and unprecedented technological change, but neglects to consider degrowth scenarios. Here the authors show that degrowth scenarios minimize many key risks for feasibility and sustainability and thus need to be thoroughly assessed.

Increasing greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture must be compensated by emissions reduction in other sectors if global emissions are to be capped. Using macroeconomic–climate modelling, this study quantifies such emission compensation efforts under different dietary choices.

Wind and solar energy must be complemented by a combination of energy storage and firm generating capacity. Here, Sepulveda et al. assess the economic value and system impact of a wide range of possible long-duration energy storage technologies, providing insights to guide innovation and policy.

Agriculture attempts to satisfy the demand for food of a growing human population but contributes to environmental degradation. However, there are technological options for agriculture to deliver food security and potentially reduce atmospheric CO₂.

Based on data from two large-scale field studies in Switzerland, Liebe, Gewinner and Diekmann examine the acceptance of green energy defaults in the household and business sectors. They find large and temporally stable default effects in both sectors.

Uncertainties and subjective choices affecting remaining carbon budgets should be fully considered when applying them to international and national climate policies.

Concrete is one of the most widely used man-made materials and is critical for the ongoing urbanization of the global population. However, owing to its widespread use, concrete can have a negative impact on the environment. This Review provides medium-term and long-term solutions to address the environmental concerns surrounding concrete production.

The world’s future food security will certainly be affected by extreme climate events, yet the location and magnitude of their impact are often overlooked. Using crop yield and food need projections under different socioeconomic conditions, this study estimates the share of the population at the risk of hunger under high and low greenhouse gas emission scenarios in the face of climate extremes.

Climate change will alter the distribution of tuna, impacting the economies of Pacific Small Island Developing States. This study finds that greater greenhouse gas emissions will worsen these impacts.

The seeding of native species is critical to the success of dryland restoration efforts. Here the authors evaluate success of seeding establishment at 174 sites on six continents, finding that some sites had nearly 100% of species successfully recruit, while 17% of sites had zero seedling success.

An intensity−duration−frequency model linking food shock risk to supply chain diversity in the USA finds that boosting a city’s food supply chain diversity increases the resistance of a city to food shocks of mild to moderate severity.

Globally, land- and fire-management policies have counterproductively caused cascading ecosystem changes that exacerbate, rather than mitigate, wildfires. Given rapidly changing climate and land-use conditions that amplify wildfire risk, a policy shift to adaptive management of fire regimes is urgently needed.

The urban heat island effect poses increasing morbidity and mortality challenges in a warming world. This Review discusses how urban vegetation — specifically, green parks, green roofs and green walls — can be used as a strategy to mitigate heat.

Outlining a conceptual framework of climate-driven fast, slow and abrupt ecological change that integrates palaeoecology, contemporary ecology and invasion biology, the authors argue that the focus of theory and practice needs to shift from managing states to managing rates of change.

Community-based adaptation, in principle, leverages existing local knowledge, capabilities and priorities, but it is unclear what factors drive its success or lack thereof. Here the authors evaluate 32 community-based adaptation initiatives in the Pacific Islands and identify key optimization points for future initiatives.

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.

The authors assess the risks to global biodiversity and Indigenous lands arising from projects financed by China’s policy banks between 2008 and 2019, and compare that with the risks associated with similar projects financed by the World Bank.

To enable net-negative CO₂ emissions, the repayment of previously accrued carbon debt by establishing the responsibility for the net removal of CO₂ by carbon-emitting parties through carbon removal obligations is necessary.

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.

The transfer of public funds between governments within a country based on ecological indicators is an emerging tool in environmental policy. A review of extant and proposed schemes identifies challenges and opportunities to expand the use of this instrument.

Energy scenarios can sometimes miss lock-in caused by planned power plant projects and uncertainty around their realization. Here, Alova et al. build a machine-learning model that predicts Africa’s electricity generation mix in 2030 based on the commissioning chances of planned projects.

The perception of risks imminent to younger technologies may hinder renewable energy firms’ access to financing. Here, Kempa et al. have used a global dataset of loans to show that the cost of debt of renewable energy firms decreased over time below those of non-renewable energy firms, which saw an increase in financing costs.

Achieving the Paris Agreement goals may require complementary institutions such as climate clubs. Enhanced technological diffusion and the provision of low-cost climate finance are shown to support the creation of climate coalitions.