Volume 11 Issue 11, November 2021

Small island developing states are currently faced with two significant challenges that are more onerous due to limited financial resources: adapting to increasing climate change risk and recovering from the pandemic. Debt-for-climate swaps provide an avenue for SIDS to address these challenges.

Local communities can play a role in helping to restore tropical peatlands by using more sustainable agricultural practices. Enhancing this role would help to address interconnected crises such as climate change, food security and environmental degradation.

Nature Climate Change talks to Felipe C. Mandarino, city information coordinator within the Rio de Janeiro city government, Brazil, about building cooperation, facing data and knowledge gaps and responding to climate change in Brazilian cities.

Climate action is needed across the Global South, with just transition the central priority. Nature Climate Change spoke to Maisa Rojas, associate professor at the University of Chile, about Chile’s progress in climate governance and the challenges ahead, as well as the opportunities with COP26.

Civil society has an important role to play in climate action. Nature Climate Change speaks to Chidi Oti-Obihara, investment banker turned climate activist, about how he found his role in the discussion.

Climate change is threatening agricultural productivity and the welfare of farmers. Increasing employment in non-farm sectors could mitigate such negative impacts, especially in developing countries.

Improvements in public transport are often regarded as essential to combat climate change. A study investigating the Chinese high-speed rail system suggests that these benefits could operate through channels other than those that one might expect.

Atmospheric rivers substantially affect the global hydrologic cycle, yet their response to past and future anthropogenic forcing remains highly uncertain. New research reveals the counterbalancing effects of aerosols and greenhouse gases and how this balance will shift to favour stronger atmospheric rivers in the coming decades.

Southern salmon populations face increased risk from a warming climate. New analysis of salmon ear bones shows outsized reliance on rarely used cold-water habitat for population survival through drought years — habitat that is expected to shrink under climate change.

Assessing the global implementation of climate adaptation is critical. Now, research quantifies where adaptation is happening and where gaps remain.

We find that the public prefers the costs of climate action to be constant over time, irrespective of whether average costs are low or high. Policymakers interested in combating global warming should therefore introduce policies that initially rely on stable cost schedules instead of the widely discussed alternative of ramping up costs over time.

Using a multi-sector model of human and natural systems, we find that the nationwide cost from state-varying climate policy in the United States is only one-tenth higher than that of nationally uniform policy. The benefits of state-led action — leadership, experimentation and the practical reality that states implement policy more reliably than the federal government — do not necessarily come with a high economic cost.

Subscriptions to a free, weekly deforestation alert system available on the simple interface Global Forest Watch reduced deforestation in the protected areas and logging concessions of tropical African forests. This suggests that freely available near-real-time forest monitoring systems can help reduce emissions from deforestation if they are integrated with forest policies.

Trade liberalization in the early 21st century increased the adaptation capacity of global food systems to climate change; further liberalization and trade facilitation could help to avoid dozens of millions being undernourished at mid-century. The global trade agenda should explicitly include climate change adaptation to achieve SDG 2 Zero Hunger.

Disclosure of climate risk to investments was expected to drive divestment from high-carbon assets. This Perspective considers the limitations of transparency to shift investment and the different markets of low- and high-carbon assets; mobilizing finance requires more than disclosure.

Carbon capture and storage is key to strong climate change mitigation scenarios, but growth is slow. This Perspective argues that confidence in the expansion of carbon capture and storage requires greater attention to reducing uncertainty over injection dynamics and the pace of storage investment decision-making.

Climate literacy—awareness of climate change and understanding that humans are responsible—is necessary for adaptation and mitigation. Levels of climate literacy across Africa are highly variable, with positive predictors of literacy identified, suggesting areas to target for increasing climate change literacy.

More than 80% of trade by volume occurs via maritime shipping, with growing pressure to reduce associated GHG emissions. The top 10 single-direction trade pairs account for nearly 20% of emissions; optimizing trade patterns could reduce emissions by 38% of current totals.

Intercity high-speed rail (HSR) can have large climate benefits with its high energy efficiency. This study explores the substitution effects of HSR on road traffic in China, which can be translated to an annual reduction of 14.76 million tons of CO₂-equivalent emissions.

Atmospheric rivers, concentrated plumes of moisture important to extratropical precipitation, have not changed with historical warming. Model simulations suggest that this is due to the competing weakening effect of aerosols and strengthening effect of greenhouse gases, which dominates with future warming.

Evidence is growing on the impacts of climate change on human and natural systems. A two-step attribution approach—machine-learning-assisted literature review coupled with grid-cell-level temperature and precipitation—allows comprehensive mapping of the evidence on impacts and tentative attribution to anthropogenic influence.

Use of an enhanced suite of marine ecosystem models and Earth system model outputs from Phase 6 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) reveals greater decline in mean global ocean animal biomass than previously projected under both strong-mitigation and high-emissions scenarios.

Highlighting the importance of rare phenotypes in population persistence, the authors show that spring-run Chinook salmon late-migrant juveniles were critical for cohort success in drought and ocean heatwave years. Combined further warming and impassable dams threaten these late migrants’ survival.

Determining progress in adaptation to climate change is challenging, yet critical as climate change impacts increase. A stocktake of the scientific literature on implemented adaptation now shows that adaptation is mostly fragmented and incremental, with evidence lacking for its impact on reducing risk.