Volume 13 Issue 3, March 2023

The transition to net-zero emissions will be contested and could lead to political polarization and social unrest. To contribute to a transition that is accepted as legitimate while remaining effective, research on public support must evolve rapidly along several dimensions.

Climate anxiety, reflecting concerns about the negative impacts of climate change, is growing. Planning and action on individual specific climate risks could be a way to reduce personal climate anxiety.

Hybrid populations have long been perceived as a threat to distinct lineages and undervalued from a conservation perspective. Now, research suggests that hybrid populations may harbour gene combinations that improve their ability to cope with changing climate conditions.

Removing fossil fuel subsidies is important for mitigation and making carbon pricing polices effective. We find that removing subsidies on fossil fuels may not generate more public resistance (or support) than introducing a carbon tax, and by specifying alternatives for revenue recycling, the level of acceptability may increase.

We estimate that US residential properties exposed to flood risks are overvalued by close to US$200 billion. We discuss where these properties are located, and who stands to lose the most from housing prices that better reflect climate risks.

Using empirical models to estimate changes in carbon stocks reveals that climate change could lead to tropical regions losing 6.8–12% of the total carbon they stored in 1950 by 2100, with the highest losses in the southeastern Amazon. Under a higher emissions scenario, total carbon losses from the tropics could double.

An integrated Earth system analysis is applied to project the probability of sequential hazards from tropical cyclones along the US East and Gulf coasts. Even a moderate-emissions scenario increases the chances of back-to-back tropical cyclone hazards and, possibly, two extreme tropical cyclone events impacting the United States within a short period of time.

Over the past four decades, Arctic sea ice has experienced a drastic decline in winter when it is recovering from summer melt. Observations and model simulations reveal that atmospheric rivers are more frequently reaching the Arctic in winter, preventing the sea ice from growing to the extent that is possible at the freezing temperature.

The authors summarize the underappreciated role of climate change in amplifying human–wildlife conflict. They synthesize evidence of climate-related conflicts and introduce a framework highlighting the environmental, ecological and sociopolitical pathways linking climate change to conflict outcomes.

How the shelf ocean around Antarctica changes with warming is not well known. Here, the authors show that a projected increase in El Niño–Southern Oscillation variability accelerates warming of the Antarctic shelf ocean but slows warming around the sea ice edges, thus influencing ice melt.

Natural gas has been seen as a bridge in the move from fossil fuels to cleaner energy. This work presents UK longitudinal survey data showing climate change beliefs increasingly diminish public support for natural gas.

Removing fossil fuel subsidy could reduce the CO₂ emissions and improve the use of government budget, while the feasibility is in doubt. This research demonstrates the public attitudes in developing countries are not worse than that for carbon tax, and better use of the public fund is preferred.

Natural hazards exacerbated by climate change pose serious risks to property markets in the United States. Ignoring these risks could create instability in housing values. This research shows the magnitude of unpriced flood risk and who stands to lose from housing prices that reflect climate risks.

When two tropical cyclones make landfall shortly after each other, they can have particularly strong effects on coastal areas. Here the authors show that the frequency of such sequential hazard-producing tropical cyclones is increasing along the US Atlantic and Gulf coasts under climate change.

During the winter season, Arctic sea ice recovers from summer melt, but this winter sea-ice growth has weakened over recent decades. Here the authors show that atmospheric rivers reach the Arctic more frequently with warming, which in turn slows down the seasonal recovery of sea ice.

Precipitation and temperature affect biomass and carbon storage in the tropics. This study shows that warming-driven contraction of humid regions and expansion of areas with dry periods could double carbon losses, with about one-third associated with decline of humid areas in South America.

The authors estimate genomic vulnerability for closely related species of rainbowfish. They find that narrow endemic species that have hybridized with a warm-adapted generalist show reduced vulnerability to climate change and that hybridization may facilitate evolutionary rescue for such species.

An EU embargo on Russian fossil fuels would lead to a rapid decrease in fossil fuel combustion, GHG emissions reductions and potential economic losses. This analysis quantifies such effects, while also demonstrating how demand-side responses could offset the negative shock.

Although the role of the human diet in climate change has been widely acknowledged, current practices fail to capture its realistic effect on warming. In this Analysis, Ivanovich et al. develop a global food consumption emission inventory and estimate the associated future climate impact using a reduced-complexity climate model.