Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
Three IPCC special reports are scheduled, which will require the Working Groups to harmonize approaches and potentially influence the formulation of the sixth Assessment Report (AR6).
Hot on the heels of last year's Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement, representatives from the global conservation community met to set the conservation agenda that will help to implement these targets.
The imbalance of observations and knowledge of impacts between developed and developing countries leads to a procedural injustice in the attribution of responsibility for climate change.
The use of long-term ecological proxies in conservation planning is currently very limited. Recent advances offer exciting prospects for enhanced use of retrospective knowledge to forecast and manage ecological outcomes under global change.
Antarctic climate trends observed in the satellite record are compared with a two hundred year paleoclimate record. The satellite record is found to be too short to attribute changes to anthropogenic forcing, with natural variability overwhelming the forced signal.
Analysis of the US’s intended nationally determined contribution (INDC) shows additional policies are likely to be needed for it to meet its promised emissions reduction target, and highlights where deeper cuts could be made.
Aquifer characteristics and water use data for 43 widely distributed small island states indicate that 44% are in a state of water stress. While recharge is projected to increase on 12 islands it is projected to decrease by up to 58% on the other 31.
The use of natural high-CO2 sites to assess the impact of ocean acidification on coral reef zooplankton shows a threefold reduction in biomass compared with ambient-CO2 sites. However, zooplankton species distribution is unchanged. The reduction may be partly due to a change in coral species.
Climate change is expected to lead to significant changes in phylogenetic diversity and endemism at a continental scale in Australia, threatening the hyper-diverse clade of eucalypt trees that dominate much of the continent.
Assessment of the emergence of novel climatic combinations, rapid displacement of climatic isoclines, and divergence between temperature and precipitation trends provides an indication of where and why novel communities are likely to emerge.
The impact of climate change on crop yield can be estimated using a variety of methods. Here, a multi-method ensemble is used to quantify ‘method uncertainty’ and improve overall confidence in projections of climate impacts on wheat yields.
Remote sensing of tropical forest activity indicates that temporal autocorrelation—an indicator of slow recovery from stress—rises steeply as precipitation falls sufficiently. This offers some support for a tipping point for forest collapse.
During periods of hydrologic stress, vegetation productivity is limited by soil moisture supply and atmospheric water demand. This study shows that atmospheric demand has a greater effect in many biomes, with implications for climate change impacts.