Coal–biomass co-firing power plants with retrofitted carbon capture and storage are seen as a promising decarbonization solution for coal-dominant energy systems. Framework with spatially explicit biomass sources, plants and geological storage sites demonstrate its effectiveness in China.

The narrative that certain areas will inevitably become uninhabitable owing to sea-level rise is powerful, yet may silence important debate about alternative climate adaptation futures. In particular, populations with low emissions and funding capacity should have their narratives centralized in adaptation.

Most models of global climate change impacts and policy do not consider adaptation or societies’ ability to adapt. Here the authors propose a way to better integrate adaptation in such models using the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway scenario framework to quantify adaptive capacity via a suite of socioeconomic indicators.

Studies on sea-level rise often claim to be useful for local decision-makers and adaptation planning. We asked researchers and practitioners to discuss the different ways in which science can inform local to global decision-making and what researchers can do to improve the utility of their findings.

The authors use niche modelling and landscape genetic approaches to understand population-level climate change vulnerability for three alpine species. Their approach reveals similar population-level vulnerability for the studied keystone species and its two beneficiary species.

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is expected to collapse with warming. Here the authors assess whether solar geoengineering could prevent such a collapse and find that this would be possible only with early deployment under low and medium emissions, highlighting the need for emissions mitigation.

The biocontrol technology (wMel) used to mitigate mosquito-borne viruses is adversely affected by heat stress. The authors integrate empirical data on mosquito population dynamics and wMel thermal sensitivity to show that the technology is generally robust to near-term climate change.

Changes in tree cover can change surface temperatures in multiple ways. Here, the authors show an asymmetric direct biophysical effect of tree cover change, as the cooling due to tree cover gain is greater in magnitude than the warming from tree cover loss in most forests.

Planned relocation can be an adaptation approach to avoid damages from increasing natural hazards yet concerns over maladaptive outcomes remain. Based on flood-related relocation cases, this study highlights the importance of community engagement in enabling sustainable livelihoods.

Climate-induced extreme events could lead to drastic socioeconomic consequences, including altered cooperation behaviours. With survey experiments among Iraqi and Syrian refugees, this study finds drought experience could reduce altruism and group identity function as the key moderator.

With climate change impacts increasingly being felt by more of the world’s population, adaptation efforts are urgently needed. However, similar to the unequal distribution of climate change impacts, the ability of societies to adapt is also heterogeneous.

A gap persists between the emissions reductions pledged by countries under the Paris Agreement and those resulting from their domestic policies. We argue that this gap in fact contains two parts: one in the policies that countries adopt, and the other in the outcomes that those policies achieve.