Editorials

There has been a series of announcements related to climate legislation from the United States of America in recent months. This shift to climate action in the United States sparks hope that its actions could encourage other countries to step up.

Each year weather records are being broken around the globe; this boreal summer has seen heat records fall across Europe, America and Central Asia. These discernible effects of climate change cannot be ignored, as combined with global issues they endanger society and well-being.

Ecosystems, and the services they provide, can support climate mitigation and adaptation, yet also suffer from climate change impacts. Now, discussions surround how to best support the eco–climate nexus, overcoming the challenges ahead and creating multiple benefits.

It is now possible to model the climate system at the kilometre scale, but more work and resources are needed to harvest the full potential of these models to resolve long-standing model biases and enable new applications of climate models.

The recent IPCC report highlights the importance of demand-side solutions in mitigation strategies. Understanding the motivation and capacity of these solutions is essential, and could help to promote collective and practical actions for this critical decade.

Phenology — the timing of important life events — is shifting in response to climate change. For trees, these shifts in spring awakening and autumn senescence have implications for productivity and carbon capture, as well as for the survival of the trees themselves, and the quality of the services they provide.

Our individual carbon footprints depend on behaviour, wealth and lifestyle. Understanding the demographics of emissions is needed for climate justice, and could help policymakers develop effective strategies for emissions reductions.

Many of the impacts of climate change will be felt first through the presence — or absence — of water and access to water resources. Water must be integrated into climate policy and adaptation planning to mitigate these impacts.

Climate change action is moving forward, with the outcomes from COP26 setting the agenda for governments to commit to. Actors in the private sector are also setting out commitments, and climate action looks to be gaining momentum across society and around the globe.

This month, Nature Climate Change formally introduces a new content type, Policy Brief. We hope it will help to bridge the gap between researchers and policy professionals.

As climate change impacts are felt more and more around the world, adapting to change is becoming critical. However, it is not clear whether actions being taken are effective in reducing risk and increasing resilience, and access to financing is crucial.

Coal has powered the world, spurring development and the advancement of society; however, the time has come to consign it to the past and find new technology to support development and advancement.

Old-fashioned qualitative research methods are still powerful in answering the most emergent climate questions we are faced with.

Climate extremes dominate headlines around the world as the IPCC releases its physical climate assessment report.

Crop production and food security remain one of the primary concerns in a changing world. Research and comments in this issue highlight the various threats to our produce and the carry-over effects of food shocks.

Global hydroclimate and atmospheric dynamics are tethered, and so is their future uncertainty. Despite this, scientists are increasingly able to identify climate change signals in noisy hydroclimate observations, aided by a growing line-up of climate model experiments and an ever-extending observational record.

COP26 will mark six years since the Paris Agreement was reached, with the ambitious 1.5 °C warming target. After the turbulent year of 2020, now is the time that countries need to commit to drive global climate action forward.

In light of the urgent need to mitigate climate change, many governments and companies are looking to the natural world for help, most notably through plans to plant forests to remove carbon from the atmosphere. However, the carbon — and social — dynamics of forests are complex.

This month marks 10 years since the first issue of Nature Climate Change. In this issue, we reflect on developments in research areas over those years and celebrate some memorable papers published in our pages.

About 12 months into the COVID-19 pandemic, its immediate and lasting impacts on the climate system and fossil fuel economy are now better understood. These insights will be fundamental to the global recovery — and ideally the green transitions that accompany it — but the implementation will be hard-won.