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Estimations of the risk from sea-level rise are often based on the amount of property inundated by water. However, risk measurements based on isolation — being cut-off from key services owing to road flooding — suggest that the impacts of sea-level rise could be more widespread and may begin earlier than anticipated.

The rate of sea-level rise varies around the world, as do local infrastructure and standards for defending against the risks of flooding. Now research indicates that coastal communities can also have very different times left to act before defences fall short of those standards.

Research using lakes and ponds as model systems contributes both to addressing the freshwater biodiversity crisis and developing general theories and frameworks for understanding how biological systems respond to climate change and other anthropogenic stressors.

A statistical analysis of data from global surveys reveals that soils react to the number of stressors as well as to the individual stressor types. Moreover, the increasing number of stressors above a critical threshold reduces soil biodiversity and impedes the delivery of various ecosystem processes.

An immediate and rapid reduction in global emissions is required for many reasons. Integrated research supports the economic case for strong near-term climate action, even before accounting for expected negative impacts on biodiversity, health and tipping points.

Causal links between plankton taxa were inferred using long-term data from ten Swiss lakes, revealing the effect of warming and nutrient levels on entire ecological networks. The resulting model suggests that warming generally reduces the number of network interactions and alters which taxa control the food webs.

Sea-level rise is threatening communities with inundation. This work considers isolation—being cut off from essential services—as a complementary metric that highlights earlier risks from high tides across the coastal United States.

Using a trait-based model that resolves key zooplankton groups, the authors reveal future shifts to food webs dominated by carnivorous and gelatinous filter-feeding zooplankton. Subsequent decreases in food nutrition are linked to declines in small pelagic fish biomass, particularly in tropical regions.

Cost-benefit analysis of climate change depends heavily on the damage function used, and it is difficult to get credible information. Multimodel comparison with newly developed bottom-up damage functions indicates the optimal temperature could be much lower than previously estimated.

The authors investigate the impact of warming and nutrient supply on entire ecological networks within ten Swiss lakes. Warming generally reduces network interactions, particularly under high phosphate, leading to shifts in trophic control of food webs.

Sea-level rise poses a considerable threat to many coastal areas as it increases the exceedance probability of local protection infrastructure. Here, the authors propose a method that shows the different timing at which the degree of local protection decreases due to sea-level rise.

Indigenous and Western knowledge ethically combined is uniquely suited to address ongoing climate challenges. To build an environment where Western and Indigenous knowledge systems thrive, funding institutions must value co-production of knowledge and be available to Indigenous experts.

Strong positive wetland methane climate feedbacks from global warming may occur but have not been accounted for in Earth system models. Now, model simulations show a substantial increase in methane emissions due to the stronger impact of warming over tropical wetlands.

Atmospheric methane concentrations are increasing and a process-based model now estimates greater methane emissions from wetlands since 2007 than previous studies. Substantial increases in 2020 and 2021 contributed to record-high growth rates in the atmospheric methane burden.

Warming reduces the greenhouse gas sink of pristine wetlands. Here the authors show that carbon dioxide emissions increase in cryptogam sites at higher latitudes, while methane and nitrous oxide emissions are enhanced in vascular-plant-dominated permafrost wetlands.

Using data on oxygen variability taken from 32 representative reef sites, the authors show that hypoxia is already common. Under future scenarios of ocean warming and deoxygenation, the duration, intensity and severity of hypoxia will increase, with nearly one-third of reefs experiencing severe hypoxia.

The authors investigate relationships between various soil stressors that exceed critical thresholds and the maintenance of ecosystem services. They show that multiple stressors crossing a high-level threshold reduces soil functioning and can be consistently used to predict ecosystem functioning.

Achieving net zero means balancing remaining emissions with carbon removal, and understanding the nature and scope of residual emissions is key to planning decarbonized energy and industrial systems. However, our analysis of long-term climate strategies shows that many governments lack clear projections for residual emissions at net zero.