The modern food industry is reshaping society and contributing to global warming. Mitigation efforts at different levels are needed to promote environmental and human health.

Although the role of the human diet in climate change has been widely acknowledged, current practices fail to capture its realistic effect on warming. In this Analysis, Ivanovich et al. develop a global food consumption emission inventory and estimate the associated future climate impact using a reduced-complexity climate model.

The authors summarize the underappreciated role of climate change in amplifying human–wildlife conflict. They synthesize evidence of climate-related conflicts and introduce a framework highlighting the environmental, ecological and sociopolitical pathways linking climate change to conflict outcomes.

An EU embargo on Russian fossil fuels would lead to a rapid decrease in fossil fuel combustion, GHG emissions reductions and potential economic losses. This analysis quantifies such effects, while also demonstrating how demand-side responses could offset the negative shock.

Environmental drivers of soil carbon and its sensitivity to warming are poorly understood. The authors compare soil samples of paired urban and natural ecosystems and show that under warming, the microbiome is an essential driver of soil carbon in urban greenspace compared with natural ecosystems.

Sea-level rise is threatening communities with inundation. This work considers isolation—being cut off from essential services—as a complementary metric that highlights earlier risks from high tides across the coastal United States.

Using a trait-based model that resolves key zooplankton groups, the authors reveal future shifts to food webs dominated by carnivorous and gelatinous filter-feeding zooplankton. Subsequent decreases in food nutrition are linked to declines in small pelagic fish biomass, particularly in tropical regions.

Cost-benefit analysis of climate change depends heavily on the damage function used, and it is difficult to get credible information. Multimodel comparison with newly developed bottom-up damage functions indicates the optimal temperature could be much lower than previously estimated.

The authors investigate the impact of warming and nutrient supply on entire ecological networks within ten Swiss lakes. Warming generally reduces network interactions, particularly under high phosphate, leading to shifts in trophic control of food webs.

Sea-level rise poses a considerable threat to many coastal areas as it increases the exceedance probability of local protection infrastructure. Here, the authors propose a method that shows the different timing at which the degree of local protection decreases due to sea-level rise.

Research on organism responses to climate change needs to incorporate biological interactions, which requires consideration of the trade-offs between scale and resolution.

Adaptation is a key societal response to reduce the impacts of climate change, yet it is poorly represented in current modelling frameworks. We identify key research gaps and suggest entry points for adaptation in quantitative assessments of climate change to enhance policy guidance.