News & Comment

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.

For effective climate policy, we need both classic and behavioural policies. Green nudges facilitate the effectiveness of a carbon tax by increasing the salience of the tax, harnessing pro-climate concerns, extending the reach of a tax by targeting behaviours directly and, importantly, increasing public acceptance of carbon taxes.

As regulatory attention on scope 3 emissions mounts, the ‘double-counting’ concern cited by companies can be addressed by allocating shared responsibility across the supply chain. Measurement and data collection present more substantial challenges in reaching an effective allocation.

Many natural disaster insurance markets were designed under historical distributions of climate risk that differ from those prevailing today. These differences create challenges for natural disaster insurance markets to mitigate the effects of climate change and also increase demand for innovative policy solutions.

Infrastructure investment needs to account for climate change globally, yet most day-to-day projects are small and poorly served by economic assessment processes. Four simple adjustments to cost–benefit analysis practices would greatly improve decision making for future infrastructure resilience.

Forward-looking information about climate risks is critical for decision makers, but the provision and accuracy of such information is limited. Innovative prediction-market designs could provide a mechanism to enhance applied climate research in an incentive-compatible way.

Time is short to secure a liveable and sustainable future; yet, inaction from governments, industry and civil society is setting the course for 3.2 °C of warming, with all the cascading and catastrophic consequences that this implies. In this context, when does civil disobedience by scientists become justified?

Current greenhouse gas emissions will continue to affect the climate even after we reach net-zero emissions. We must understand how and prepare for a cooling planet.

Northern expansion is often seen as a solution to climate-driven agricultural challenges in lower latitudes, yet little is known about cultivation–permafrost interactions. We outline four science-based adaptations, informed by farmer knowledge, that reduce risk and inform decisions to sustainably manage and develop permafrost-agroecosystems.

Climate and freedom are interconnected in various ways. The recent German verdict on climate protection realigned the fundamental rights in liberal democratic societies and marks an important step in climate litigation around the world.

Climate model projections of the terrestrial water cycle are often described using simple empirical models (‘indices’) that can mislead. Instead, we should seek to understand climate model projections using simple physical models.

Ecosystem services are often omitted from climate policy owing to difficulties in estimating the economic value of climate-driven ecosystem changes. However, recent advances in data and methods can help us overcome these challenges and move towards a more comprehensive accounting of climate impacts.

The expansion of urban environments contributes to climate change and biodiversity loss. Implementing nature-based strategies to create ‘regenerative living cities’ will be critical for climate change mitigation and adaptation and will produce measurable biodiversity and wellbeing co-benefits.

Incorporating the carbon services of wild animals into financial markets has the potential to benefit both climate and conservation through the development of carbon offsets that are equitable and nature positive. However, for this paradigm to be successful, many challenges regarding science, finance and law still need to be overcome.

Sharp fronts and eddies that are ubiquitous in the world ocean, as well as features such as shelf seas and under-ice-shelf cavities, are not captured in climate projections. Such small-scale processes can play a key role in how the large-scale ocean and cryosphere evolve under climate change, posing a challenge to climate models.

Current global climate models struggle to represent precipitation and related extreme events, with serious implications for the physical evidence base to support climate actions. A leap to kilometre-scale models could overcome this shortcoming but requires collaboration on an unprecedented scale.