Articles in 2015

Potential interchange between north Atlantic and north Pacific fish communities is modelled for future Arctic conditions under climate change.

Extreme La Niña events occur when cold sea surface temperatures across the central Pacific Ocean create a strong temperature gradient to the Maritime continent in the west. This work projects an increase in frequency of La Niña events due to faster land warming relative to the ocean, and a greater chance of them occurring following extreme El Niño events.

Knowledge of how climate change will affect temperatures on a regional scale is needed for effective planning and preparedness. This study uses five climate models to investigate regional warming. It shows that warming is nonlinear for doublings of atmospheric CO₂ and that nonlinearity increases with higher CO₂ concentrations.

Over half of the wood harvested globally is used as fuel. Unsustainable harvesting can deplete woody biomass, contributing to forest degradation, deforestation and climate change. A spatially explicit assessment of pan-tropical woodfuel supply and demand is used to estimate where harvest exceeds regrowth and the resultant GHG emissions for 2009.

Populations may exhibit different sensitivity to climate change depending on where they occur in their climatic range. Experimental results now show that tree species growing nearest to their warm range limit exhibit reduced net photosynthesis and growth in response to warming, whereas those near their cold range limit show improved functioning.

Integrated assessment models estimate the impact of climate change on current economic output, but not on its rate of growth. This study modifies a standard integrated assessment model to allow climate change to directly affect gross GDP growth rates. Results show that climate change significantly slows down GDP growth in poor regions but not in rich countries, with implications for the level of near-term mitigation.

The Mekong Delta in Vietnam is facing rising sea levels that are expected to exacerbate ongoing problems of saline intrusion into agricultural land. An assessment of hydrology, agriculture and human behaviour identifies the combination of adaptation strategies that are likely to yield the most effective results for those living in the Mekong Delta.

Controlled embankment breaches could reduce flood risk for the Ganges–Brahmaputra tidal delta plain as sea level rises.