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Climate change assessment reports are increasing in complexity as the knowledge base grows exponentially. In this Perspective, the authors advocate, and provide recommendations, for knowledge synthesis to become more common as a way to better inform such assessments.
There can be a disconnect between everyday life and the natural world, but a healthy diverse environment, where humanity can thrive, requires collective action to address the threats from climate change and development.
Current European Union policies are insufficient to achieve residential heating decarbonization targets. Substantial subsidies for heat pumps and carefully targeted incentives for home renovation are critical to efficiently and affordably meet climate goals. We emphasize the importance of adapting strategies to national contexts.
Mitigation actions can have large-scale health co-benefits, which, however, are not effectively incorporated into policy design and implementation. This Perspective overviews the health co-benefits and cost-effectiveness of climate policies and discusses ways to improve their policy relevance.
Decarbonizing the residential sector is essential for net-zero targets, and the EU has established ambitious policy packages with various instruments. This research shows that beyond carbon trading programmes, massive heat-pump subsidies and targeted energy renovation incentives are needed.
Selective migration patterns emerge in flood-prone regions in the USA. The sociodemographic profiles of individuals who were more inclined to move in or out of flood-prone areas were strikingly different. Media sentiment aggravates population replacement in these regions, leading to short-term structure changes in the housing market and long-term socioeconomic decline.
In this Perspective, the authors discuss how to robustly consider climate change impacts in ecosystem risk assessments. They highlight challenges in defining impacts, indicators and thresholds, in collating data, and in estimating and reporting risk, and propose solutions to inform conservation.
Genebanks hold the key to crop resilience and adaptation, yet their potential remains underutilized. Now, a study demonstrates how merging genomic and environmental data can unveil the best-suited germplasm for future climates.
The authors consider the future climate resilience and genomic adaptive capacity of the globally important crop sorghum using 1,937 global accessions. They identify the best potential parents and geographies for crop improvements, and underscore the need for better accessibility of plant resources.
Emerging agroforestry initiatives focus on planting trees rather than managing existing forestland. The result is a missed opportunity to support forest ecosystems, rural livelihoods and climate mitigation.
The adoption of natural climate solutions in crop-lands, such as cover crops, no tillage and residue retention, is widely assumed to provide both climate change mitigation and crop yield benefits. We find important spatially variable trade-offs between these outcomes and demonstrate that safeguarding crop yields will substantially lower the mitigation potential of natural climate solutions.
As an important policy instrument for building sector decarbonization, bans on fossil fuel-based heating face fierce opposition with doubts over their economic viability. With a unified perspective that incorporates the views of proponents and opponents, we discuss the importance of targeted policies to break the deadlock.
A gap remains in understanding flood-induced migration across sociodemographic groups. This study quantifies the flood-induced inflow/outflow selective migration by education, employment and age in the United States, and reveals how media sentiment and income effect aggravate selective migration.
The authors combine horizontal and vertical climate velocities to understand how marine species shift in response to climate change. They show that vertical velocity, which is often overlooked, better explains climate responses, with implications for species adaptation and fishing resources.
Glaciers are retreating under climate change and generating excessive meltwater. A modelling study shows that regrowing glaciers may lead to water scarcity in the centuries after overshooting the +1.5 °C temperature target.
