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.

Cloud droplet number concentrations are often assumed to depend linearly on atmospheric aerosols (in log–log space). Here the authors show that this relationship is instead sigmoid, which delays additional warming due to air pollution mitigation by 20–30 years in heavily polluted regions.

Verification of reported fossil fuel emissions is critical for tracking the progress of the Paris Agreement. Here, a simple model suggests the stability of the sensitivity of net carbon exchange to climate and carbon dioxide forcing and validates reported global emissions with improved accuracy.

The authors define the time of emergence—the time at which climate change signals emerge from the noise of ecosystem variability—for the great tit Parus major. They show that the time of emergence differs across levels, occurring earlier at the population level rather than at the trait or vital rate levels.

Fossil fuel companies need to align their activities with the climate goals and reduce their production rapidly. This research based on an updated methodology shows that these companies would produce more than their cumulative production budgets by 2050 if the recent trend continues.

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.

Climate change has been identified as a driver of instability and conflict around the world. However, how climate change and the transition to a net-zero world might alter the character of military operations is often overlooked.

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.