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Climate action is urgently needed, with reports appearing regularly highlighting the current state of the planet and scientific understanding of what is to come. There are steps being made that should be celebrated, but more is needed.
Climate change mitigation politics is not delivering on climate targets. Recent research suggests that a general formal framework that represents the behaviour of citizens, consumers, firms and parties explains why.
The authors investigate the response of Archaea to experimental warming in a tallgrass prairie ecosystem. Warming was linked to reduced diversity and convergent succession, with further links to changed ecosystem function. Stochastic processes dominated community changes but decreased over time.
The speed at which terrestrial organisms are shifting their ranges in response to climate is consistently lower than that predicted by models. However, the use of microclimate-based, rather than macroclimate-based, predictions virtually eliminates these discrepancies.
The authors model historic and current distributions of grassland and heathland plants using both macro- and microclimate data. While macroclimate models predict the need for major range shifts (14 km median), microclimate models predict much smaller shifts that more closely match observed patterns.
Northern peatland carbon sink plays a vital role in climate regulation. Here, the authors show that wildfire reduced peatland carbon uptake and enhanced emissions from degraded peatlands; climate change impacts accelerated carbon losses where increased burn rate and severity reduced carbon sink.
Global runoff increases with carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration because of the synergistic effects of physiological responses to CO2 and the responses of vegetation and soil moisture to CO2-induced climate change. These land surface changes are far more important than the direct effects of climate change on global runoff in a CO2-warmed world.
Loss and damage funds are intended to support low-income regions experiencing impacts of human-caused climate change. Currently, event attribution should only play a limited role in determining loss and damage spending, but this role could grow as the field advances.
Global runoff is subject to multiple influences with high uncertainties in its projections. The authors show that global runoff is expected to increase mainly due to vegetation and soil moisture responses to rising CO2 and radiative forcing, rather than through direct effects of climate change.
