Articles in 2019

Misleading claims about mass migration induced by climate change continue to surface in both academia and policy. This requires a new research agenda on ‘climate mobilities’ that moves beyond simplistic assumptions and more accurately advances knowledge of the nexus between human mobility and climate change.

Minimizing the adverse consequences of sea-level change presents a key societal challenge. New modelling is necessary to examine the implications of global policy decisions that determine future greenhouse gas emissions and local policies around coastal risk that influence where and how we live.

Moving whole communities away from the coastline sounds like a remote possibility. But as sea levels rise, relocation might be an increasingly inevitable, though challenging, option.

Migration is an important means to cope with the impacts of climate-related shocks. Research shows that networks of prior migrants aid this crucial adaptation mechanism.

By many accounts, climate change is already driving human migration, but fresh thinking about the consequences of increasingly stringent borders, the intervening effects of global and local policy and how best to characterize human adaptive responses is needed to properly understand whether a crisis is on the horizon.

Climate change is likely to increase human migration, but future climate-related migration flows will depend heavily on the adaptive capacity of people living in vulnerable regions and on the border policies of potential destination countries. Current opportunities for mobility are constrained by increasingly strict border enforcement and the securitization of international migration.

Model estimates of future hydroclimate are uncertain, especially at the regional scale. This Perspective argues that constraining model runoff and its sensitivity to precipitation and temperature can greatly reduce this uncertainty and improve climate model utility in water resource applications.

Terrestrial primary productivity will increase with CO₂ fertilization, but water limitation will decrease this positive effect. Analyses of Earth system model projections show that extreme droughts will have a much stronger impact on future productivity than mild and moderate droughts.

Though critical to many projected pathways to meet global climate targets, the challenges facing biomass energy with carbon capture and storage have yet to enter the forefront of public dialogue.

Qualitative comparative analysis of 25 case studies across climate change hotspots in Africa and Asia shows that male migration and women’s poor working conditions combine with either institutional failure or poverty to constrain women’s agency, which limits their adaptive capacity.

The ways in which ocean communities respond to warming are related to their composition. The variety of thermal affinities and thermal ranges of individual species, along with vertical temperature gradients, shape community response and allow the prediction of regional responses to warming.

Increased hybridization has the potential to threaten species diversity. Here population genetic computer simulations show that climate-induced adaptive introgression could readily lead to hybridization even when reproductive isolation is independent from climate.

Nitrous oxide is a potent greenhouse gas for which global emission estimates, driven largely by fertilizer input, are highly uncertain. An inversion approach based on atmospheric measurements yields global increases more than twice as high as the IPCC default.

Opinions on climate policy in the United States are politically polarized. Here, survey research shows that opinion polarization on the Green New Deal developed rapidly due to decreasing support among Republicans, which was associated with exposure to conservative media and increasing familiarity with the policy.

Wind speeds have reduced globally over land since the 1980s. In situ data show that this reversed around 2010, with natural ocean–atmosphere variability thought to drive the wind speed changes, as well as a 17% increase in potential wind energy for 2010–2017 and a boosted wind power capacity factor.