News & Comment

Water management in the western United States is rooted in an adversarial system that is highly sensitive to climate change. Reforms are needed to ensure water management is efficient, resilient and equitable moving forward.

To align their portfolios with the Paris Agreement, investors need to know the emissions of companies they invest in. Estimating these should start from a precautionary principle that disincentivizes free-riding and protects the planet.

In recent decades, India has witnessed a rapid pace of migration from areas with intensive agriculture to populated megacities, which are faced with increasing threat from climate hazards. Greater attention is needed for vulnerable new migrants who lack necessary resources when designing adaptation and mitigation policies.

Improving agricultural activity data is a cost-effective option for reducing the uncertainty of greenhouse gas inventories and monitoring mitigation actions, meeting multiple national data needs, and bolstering investments. It’s time to direct effort to this opportunity.

Initiatives to protect carbon sinks are crucial to mitigate climate change and avert its worst effects. Advancing the rights of women and forest-dependent communities will strengthen these initiatives and enable them to have greater impact.

Restoration of forest cover can curtail the climate crisis and provide many co-benefits, or waste limited resources. To use restoration of forest cover to its highest potential, global dynamic monitoring is needed that combines existing restoration projects with control plots and remote-sensing technologies.

Private insurance is a key component of strategies to manage physical climate change impacts, but existing scenarios used by insurers are not well suited to making business decisions. We call for a complementary normative approach, based on business objectives, that delivers actionable information to decision-makers.

Weather and climate service providers around the world are looking to issue assessments of the human role in recent extreme weather events. For this attribution to be of value, it is important that vulnerability is acknowledged and questions are framed appropriately.

The 2009 pledge to mobilize US$100 billion a year by 2020 in climate finance to developing nations was not specific on what types of funding could count. Indeterminacy and questionable claims make it impossible to know if developed nations have delivered; as 2020 passes, opportunity exists to address these failures in a new pledge.

For its green transition, the EU plans to fund the development of digital twins of Earth. For these twins to be more than big data atlases, they must create a qualitatively new Earth system simulation and observation capability using a methodological framework responsible for exceptional advances in numerical weather prediction.

Reduced complexity climate models are useful tools with practical policy applications, yet evaluation of their performance and application is nascent. We call for stakeholder-driven development and assessment to address user needs, including provision of open-source code and guidance to inform model selection and application.

Despite a strong media presence and pledges from high-profile investors, the divestment movement has largely failed to mobilize financial markets in the war on carbon. Divestment 2.0 will require major tweaking to more effectively redirect the flow of capital and catalyse greater corporate climate action.

As the world’s economies seek to use new renewable energy developments to address climate change and reinvigorate economies post-COVID-19, avoiding a fixation on targets in decision-making will ensure positive social and environmental outcomes.

Co-production is an increasingly popular approach to knowledge generation encouraged by donors and research funders. However, power dynamics between institutions in the Global North and South can, if not adequately managed, impede the effectiveness of co-production and pose risks for long-term sustainability.

Observed ice-sheet losses track the upper range of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report sea-level predictions, recently driven by ice dynamics in Antarctica and surface melting in Greenland. Ice-sheet models must account for short-term variability in the atmosphere, oceans and climate to accurately predict sea-level rise.

We need a modern-day Marshall Plan to build climate resilience in the developing world. It is doable if, for each dollar spent reaching net zero, we spend an additional 25 cents on building resilience.

Phasing out coal requires expanding the notion of a ‘just transition’ and a roadmap that specifies the sequence of coal plant retirement, the appropriate policy instruments as well as ways to include key stakeholders in the process.

Extreme weather damage databases report no significant heatwave impacts in sub-Saharan Africa since 1900, yet the region has experienced a number of heatwaves and will be affected disproportionately by them under climate change. Addressing this reporting discrepancy is crucial to assess the impacts of future extreme heat there.

Planned relocation of communities exposed to climate hazards is an important adaptation measure. However, relocation planning and policies must recognize and support those who do not wish to relocate, particularly groups with strong place attachment and for whom relocation may increase, not reduce, vulnerability.

In risk analysis, it is recognized that hazards can often combine to worsen their joint impact, but impact data for a rail network show that hazards can also tend to be mutually exclusive at seasonal timescales. Ignoring this overestimates worst-case risk, so we therefore champion a broader view of risk from compound hazards.