Browse Articles

Urban areas are an important focus for effective climate action in the coming decade. This Perspective proposes transformational strategies to accelerate and upscale the impact of the planned Special Report on Climate Change and Cities in the IPCC seventh assessment cycle.

The authors combine field data with models of coastal geomorphology and bird behaviour and dynamics to understand the impact of sea-level rise on shorebird populations. They show that habitat quality is already declining and that the current focus on habitat quantity loss can underestimate threats.

How the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) will change under sustained warming beyond the year 2100 is not well known. Here the authors show that while ENSO variability will exhibit diverse changes in the short term, continued warming will lead to a consistent decrease in variability in the long term.

The changing climate threatens water quality in lakes, particularly oxygen levels. Here the authors present evidence for northern lakes of rapidly reducing oxygen levels, mainly driven by longer stratification in the warm season, with implications for lake ecosystems.

Observational data suggest a dramatic increase in the salinity contrast between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans over the course of the past half-century. Ocean dynamical processes driven by winds and warming, in addition to surface freshwater fluxes, make important contributions to basin-scale changes in ocean salinity.

Ocean salinity changes are thought to be dominated by freshwater fluxes. Here the authors show that amplification of the Atlantic–Pacific salinity contrast also involves wind- and ocean warming-driven processes, with larger salinity increases in the North Atlantic, relative to the North Pacific.

How the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) changes has strong effects on tropical regions. Here the authors show that while the ITCZ moves northwards over the first one to two decades of CO₂ emissions, the long-term migration is southward, linked to delayed surface warming in the Southern Ocean.

Adaptation evidence and knowledge are diverse and unequally represented in global adaptation discourse. The Adaptation Futures 2023 conference sought to bring this diversity together to advance more inclusive and impactful adaptation science, and confronted both the benefits and the trade-offs that this effort entails.

Effective climate action requires understanding of the contribution of individual actions, firms and industries to greenhouse gas emissions. Now a study illustrates widespread misestimations of emission impacts and reveals underlying psychological processes.

Analysis of 393,139 forest inventory plots shows that increased biodiversity weakens the sensitivity of spring leaf-out dates to warming, possibly owing to diversity-driven changes in root depth and soil biogeophysical and biogeochemical processes, among potential mechanisms.

Individual actions are important to reduce emissions, yet consumers’ carbon incompetence may lead to ineffective efforts. This study demonstrates the consistent inaccuracy in assessing emissions of behaviours, firms and industries, which may be driven by lack of information or expertise.

Water scarcity is becoming increasingly severe under climate change, and women often bear most of the burden of collecting water. This research finds that both temperature rises and reduced precipitation increase women’s daily water collection time, thereby undermining their welfare globally.

The authors combine 393,139 forest inventory plots with satellite data to understand the impact of biodiversity on the sensitivity of spring leaf-out dates to temperature (S_T). They show that high diversity significantly weakens S_T, a relationship that Earth system models largely fail to reproduce.

Regional marine cloud brightening (MCB) has been proposed as a form of geoengineering. Here the authors show that a regional MCB aiming to reduce warming in the Western United States under today’s conditions would be less efficient under warmer conditions and would exaggerate warming in other regions.

To accept carbon pricing, citizens desire viable alternatives to fossil fuel-based options. As inflation and higher interest rates have exacerbated access barriers for capital-intensive green substitutes, the political success of carbon pricing will be measured by how well policy design enables consumers to switch.