Articles in 2022

With the development of carbon emission allowance markets worldwide, concerns that they could attract excessive speculation have also grown. This Perspective discusses the potential scale and impacts of financial trading, as well as approaches to improve carbon market monitoring and oversight.

When considering how ecosystems will react to climate change the importance of dead matter has been largely overlooked. Here we discuss why dead material is integral to ecosystem form and function, and why its persistence or degradation must be explicitly included in models considering ecosystem futures in a rapidly changing world.

Global lessons are emerging on the enablers of effective knowledge co-production. An inclusion of greater reflexivity, which incorporates broad socio-political perspectives and feedbacks, could be the next frontier for the integrated assessment communities.

A better understanding of the role of language in societies is required — for example, whether adoption of emergency terminology could impact views and practices. For both researchers and communication strategists, a thorough consideration of the interconnections between language and social contexts is crucial.

Efforts to achieve emissions targets often fall short. Science can help meet the targets by assessing the feasibility of initiatives proposed to reach them, focusing on issues of adoption and implementation and the behavioural plasticity of intended responders.

Considering cryosphere and warming uncertainties together implies drastically increased risk of threshold crossing in the cryosphere, even under lower-emission pathways, and underscores the need to halve emissions by 2030 in line with the 1.5 °C limit of the Paris Agreement.

Temporarily exceeding temperature targets could increase risk of crossing tipping-element thresholds. This study considers a range of overshoot scenarios in a stylized network model and shows that overshoots increase tipping risks by up to 72% compared with remaining within targets.

Ocean carbon uptake could be affected by changes in circulation. This modelling study shows that meridional overturning circulation slowdown increases deep-ocean storage via the biological pump but decreases carbon uptake via the solubility pump, with a net reduction in oceanic uptake of CO₂.

The socio-political factors influencing societal responses to drought are often overlooked in risk assessments. Here, a social-environmental scenario that bridges natural and social sciences is used to analyse responses of a Southern African city to unprecedented drought.

The authors conduct a national inventory on individual tree carbon stocks in Rwanda using aerial imagery and deep learning. Most mapped trees are located in farmlands; new methods allow partitioning to any landscape categories, effective planning and optimization of carbon sequestration and the economic benefits of trees.

A meta-analysis reveals greater variation in heat tolerance within marine than terrestrial taxa. This variation corresponds to the spatial patterns in the maximum temperature populations of marine species experience. Although populations at the equatorward range edges of species’ distributions are particularly vulnerable to warming, standing genetic variation within species might promote an adaptive response elsewhere.

The authors quantify the thermal tolerance of 305 populations from 61 taxa by meta-analysis. They reveal strong population-level differentiation in marine and intertidal taxa, but not terrestrial or freshwater taxa, and highlight the need to consider such variation in climate vulnerability predictions.

Accurately assessing emissions reductions for various greenhouse gases to stay within temperature targets is important. Here, an adaptive approach, based solely on observations and not on model projections, allows quantification of emissions reductions required to achieve any temperature target.

The authors analyse the impacts of drought on tree growth for various species of various ages to assess the influences of forest demographic shift on future drought responses. The increasing proportion of young trees showing greater growth reduction to drought raises concern on future carbon storage.

In this Perspective, the authors argue that radical, rather than conventional, interventions are necessary to address climate change. They discuss the definitions and interpretations of the term ‘radical’, and present a typology of radical intervention that addresses the root drivers of climate change.