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The people that are most concerned about climate change do not always take action. Behavioural modelling shows that concerned citizens are more likely to act if they believe similar people are taking action, and that their action will make a difference.
Droughts are intensifying under climate change. Research into the resilience of stream food webs to drought now shows that ‘rewiring’ of food web structure in the face of species losses helps to buffer changes to the overall network structure.
Many campaigns to get people to purchase sustainable products highlight self-interest. However, experiments now show that emphasizing the environmental benefit of such goods may be more effective.
Reducing energy usage is important for climatechange mitigation. This Perspective focuses on the use and promise of agent-based modelling to understand the complexities of energy demand, including consumer behaviour.
Public understanding of climate change is well researched, but little is known about public perceptions of ocean acidification. New survey data shows that public awareness of ocean acidification in Great Britain is low compared to that of climate change.
This Perspective describes a decision science approach to applying sociological and behavioural research to the design of effective climate- and energy-related policies.
Deep international cooperation will be needed to tackle climate change. This Perspective looks at how decentralized policy coordination involving partial efforts to build confidence and reduce emissions could foster such cooperation.
Building bridges between three analytical approaches with quite different foundational bases should lead to a more comprehensive understanding of low-carbon transitions, in turn leading to more informed and effective policy decisions.
This Perspective introduces a special Collection titled Energy, Climate and Society—jointly produced by Nature Energy and Nature Climate Change—that focuseson the social science insights into the linked problems of energy sustainability and climate change.
The Earth's climate evolves in response to both externally forced changes and internal variability. Now research suggests that both drivers combine to set the pace of Arctic warming caused by large-scale sea-ice loss.
This study presents a new use of a widely used metric known as the global warming potential (GWP) to compare the impact of cumulative climate pollutants such as CO2 versus short-lived climate pollutants, such as methane and black carbon.
This study suggests that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation phase influences how much sea-ice loss contributes to Arctic amplification, with warming being larger during the negative phase with greater sea-ice loss.
Adaptation plans are an increasingly important part of US communities’ responses to climate change, but little is known about their content. Analysis of 44 plans shows that most fail to prioritize impacts or provide detailed implementation processes.
This study shows that 80% of extracted groundwater ends up in the ocean and contributed 0.27 mm per year to sea-level rise in 2000. These numbers indicate that previous studies overestimated groundwater contributions over the past century.
Wildfire damage is expected to increase under climate warming. Research now suggests that increased human exposure to wildfires will be driven primarily by population growth in areas with frequent wildfires, rather than by a general increase in fire area.