Volume 14 Issue 2, February 2024

Ongoing climate change has the potential to reduce people’s direct experiences with nature, leading to or further exacerbating the ‘extinction of experience’. We argue that understanding these impacts is crucial, as the extinction of experience can have adverse consequences for both humans and the natural environment.

Despite the promise of climate-smart agriculture (CSA) to improve food security in South Asia, most CSA practices and technologies have not been widely adopted. We identify the key barriers to CSA adoption in South Asia and suggest strategies to overcome them to increase CSA adoption at scale.

Accurate representation of permafrost carbon emissions is crucial for climate projections, yet current Earth system models inadequately represent permafrost carbon. Sustained funding opportunities are needed from government and private sectors for prioritized model development.

Oceans, covering more than 70% of Earth’s surface, play a vital role in regulating the climate by absorbing heat and carbon dioxide. Now research shows oceans have warmed by more than 1.5 °C since the beginning of the industrial era, challenging previous estimates and emphasizing the urgency of global action.

A warming climate can alter the food sources that support animals in Arctic ecosystems. Now, research provides empirical evidence of such a shift, with widespread implications for global carbon cycling.

Climate warming can impact predators directly as well as indirectly by affecting their prey and habitat. How predators respond to such changes is largely unknown. Now, experimental work shows the ability of spiders to adjust their webs in response to warming-induced changes in plant communities that alter prey size distributions.

Tropical instability waves (TIWs) are an important component of the equatorial Pacific climate. An analysis of satellite observations, in situ measurements and ocean circulation models indicates that TIW activity has intensified in the central equatorial Pacific by approximately 12 ± 6% per decade since the 1990s.

Public engagement is necessary for climate action, yet it is difficult to achieve. This Perspective explores three assumptions about public engagement and provides suggestions for overcoming these to facilitate better engagement.

Recent US climate bills mark a major step in domestic climate actions, while their successful implementation relies on strong assumptions. This Perspective discusses potential challenges regarding supply, consumer demand and political polarization and how insights of social science could help to overcome these challenges.

The increase in atmospheric methane has been accelerating since 2007, and identifying drivers is critical for climate mitigation. In this study, the authors show that the expansion of rice cultivation in Africa accounts for 7% of rising emissions.

The authors investigate the impacts of excluding ecosystem data from Russian stations in the Arctic. While the current network of Arctic stations is already biased, the exclusion of Russian stations lowers representativeness and creates further biases that can rival end-of-century climate change shifts.

Ocean eddies impact circulation, heat and gas fluxes between the ocean and the atmosphere. Modelling how warming will alter their occurrence in the Arctic shows that sea ice decline and increased baroclinic instability drive an increase in eddy kinetic energy.

Tropical instability waves (TIWs) are an important component of the equatorial Pacific climate. Here the authors show that TIW activity has intensified in the central equatorial Pacific at ∼12 ± 6% per decade over the recent three decades.

Understanding temperature change since the pre-industrial period is essential for climate action. This study uses an ocean proxy to better quantify when anthropogenic warming began and estimates that global temperatures have already increased by 1.7 °C.

The authors estimate the global vulnerability of wheat crops to wheat blast under current and future climates. They show that warmer, more humid climates can increase wheat blast infection, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere, subsequently reducing global wheat production.

The authors quantify changes in carbon flow to Arctic tundra and boreal forest consumers under warming. Small-mammal specimens separated by 30 years and wolf spiders from short-term warming experiments show similar patterns of change, switching from plant-based to fungal-based food webs.

The authors show shifts in predatory spider web mesh size under experimental warming in an alpine meadow. Web mesh size decreased for a large spider species, but increased for a small species, with changes linked to altered prey size spectra following soil moisture and plant community shifts.

The desire to justify carbon-emitting behaviours could influence people’s climate change beliefs due to motivated cognition. Based on a pre-registered survey experiment in the United States, the study, however, finds no evidence supporting the claim in explaining climate denial and environmentally harmful behaviour.