Volume 1 Issue 6, September 2011

The new United Nations panel can offer real hope of illuminating the threat to biodiversity, not least from climate change.

Arguments for action on climate change that appeal to social values, rather than individual wealth, are more likely to succeed in the long term.

When the price of oil jumps, logic dictates that people should rush to invest in renewables. But it's not so simple.

As we face perhaps the biggest challenge in our species' history, Chris Stringer — a palaeoanthropologist at London's Natural History Museum and author of The Origin Of Our Species — tells Nature Climate Change how our hominid cousins battled past climate change.

Helping to build the innovative capacity of developing countries is key to setting them on a path to low-carbon development, writes Sonja van Renssen.

Moving freight over land is a dirty job, fraught with political complexities. Anna Petherick looks at the economic issues behind cleaning it up.

The response to ocean acidification varies widely among, and even within, calcifying taxa. A study sheds light on this perplexing variability by quantifying the role of external organic layers in protecting calcified structures from corrosive sea water.

As atmospheric CO₂ increases, more plant litter is expected to enter the soil, stimulating turnover of organic matter and release of carbon. New field data show that this will intensify the terrestrial carbon cycle in the long term, and may counterbalance expected gains in carbon storage.

The voluntary emission reductions pledged under the Copenhagen Accord are almost certainly insufficient to limit global warming to 2 °C. However, using the Copenhagen Green Climate Fund for mitigation efforts could achieve the reductions needed to fill the gap.

The contributions of ice melt and ocean thermal expansion to sea-level rise during the last interglacial period are poorly constrained. A new quantification of their roles implies that the Antarctic ice sheet may be more sensitive to climate change than once thought.

Noxious cyanobacteria pose a considerable health threat to freshwater ecosystems. Research now suggests that toxic strains may be outcompeted by their non-toxic counterparts as surface concentrations of carbon dioxide increase.

Managing climate risks to fresh waters has so far been approached by designing action plans. Now adaptation protocols are integrating knowledge of water-system vulnerabilities into more flexible strategies to keep taps running and ecosystems healthy.

Enhanced tropical forest productivity, facilitated by increasing carbon dioxide concentrations, could act as a substantial carbon sink. However, a long-term field experiment shows that increased leaf-litter inputs to the soil as productivity rises could stimulate the release of significant amounts of soil carbon, partially offsetting predicted gains in carbon storage.

Ocean acidification poses a threat to marine calcifiers, but their response varies widely. An analysis of Mediterranean corals and molluscs now shows that the ability to continue shell and skeleton growth in corrosive seawater is determined in part by the existence of outer organic protective layers. High temperatures, however, modify resistance to acidification.

Climate impacts on biodiversity are usually assessed at the morphospecies level. An analysis of the distribution and mitochondrial DNA variability of nine montane aquatic insect species in Europe suggests range contractions will be accompanied by severe loss of genetic diversity. These results imply that morphospecies-scale assessments may greatly underestimate potential biodiversity losses from climate change.

The Fudan Tyndall Centre in Shanghai is an innovative institute dedicated to interdisciplinary climate research. Professor Trevor Davies of the University of East Anglia, who co-directs the centre with Professor Yiqi Luo, talks to Nature Climate Change about the initiative.

Climate-KIC is one of the first three Knowledge Innovation Communities designated on 1 January 2010 by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). It uniquely bring together education, research, business and government to create the environment to foster innovation for addressing societal issues. This promotional review highlights the scope and potential of this ambitious experiment in creating an integrated public–private community to drive systemic innovation in the field of climate change adaptaton and mitigation.