Volume 2 Issue 1, January 2012

Regardless of what happened at the Durban climate summit, immediate action is required on climate change, and poor nations must be treated fairly.

Methods for assessing the carbon footprints of products can favour low- over high-yielding agricultural systems when carbon removals are included.

Temporary carbon-sequestration and carbon-storage projects help offset fossil-fuel carbon emissions, but how effective are they?

Resettlement of people living on islands in anticipation of climate impacts risks maladaptation, but some forms of population movement carry fewer risks and larger rewards in terms of adapting to climate change.

It is responsible for the fastest-growing and second-largest source of carbon emissions, so can transport clean up its act? Europe is leading the charge on tackling the problem.

Composer and string musician, turned award-winning environmentalist, Aubrey Meyer tells Nature Climate Change why he is campaigning for countries to adopt his 'contraction and convergence' model of global development to avoid dangerous climate change.

Meeting agreed targets for the decarbonization of Europe's energy sector is a tall order, but progress is being made — Sonja van Renssen reports.

As Australia anticipates its carbon tax, Anna Petherick contends that of the world's dirtiest economies, this nation is leading the way in the design of policies to price emissions.

It is argued by many that market-based policies along with cash transfers will make it easier for nations to forge deals to cut carbon emissions. However, emission-intensive manufacturing in China and India could be hit especially hard by this approach.

The systematic bias in the position and strength of the 'roaring forties' that is found in climate models affects our present ability to predict carbon dioxide uptake by the Southern Ocean.

Climate change can be robustly attributed to human activities using different datasets, despite uncertainties in the processing of observational data.

The rising demand for road vehicles increases Europe's oil dependency and carbon emissions. Switching to alternative cars and fuels can help energy security and climate change policy, if consumers can be persuaded.

Tropical species are considered especially sensitive to climate change, but research now shows that a tropical reef fish can rapidly acclimate over multiple generations. Acute exposure to a 1.5 °C and 3.0 °C temperature rise decreased an individual’s ability to perform aerobic activities such as swimming or foraging by 15% and 30% respectively, but this did not occur when both parents and offspring were reared at the higher temperature.

One of the impacts of ocean warming is a decrease in dissolved oxygen, with implications for valuable pelagic fish species. A study shows that the oxygenated upper ocean layer in the tropical northeast Atlantic thinned at a rate of around one metre per year between 1960 and 2010, and, by tracking individually tagged fish, demonstrates that this contraction in the oxygenated layer limited the movement of blue marlin.

Adult fish seem relatively resilient to increased carbon dioxide levels, but how early-life-stage fish fare remains less clear. In a study, the estuarine fish Menidia beryllina experienced severely reduced survival and growth rates in its early life stages under levels of ocean acidification expected later this century. This suggests that ocean acidification may affect fish populations, because small changes in early-life survival can generate large fluctuations in adult-fish abundance.

Ocean acidification—resulting from anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere—has been shown to affect fish growth rates and reproduction. Now research shows detrimental effects of ocean acidification on the development of Atlantic cod larvae—a mass-spawning fish species of high commercial importance—suggesting that ocean acidification could cause additional larval mortality, affecting populations of already exploited cod stocks.

Global climate models have a well-known bias in the position and strength of the Southern Hemisphere westerly winds. Research reveals that this bias increases carbon uptake by the ocean, reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, in climate model simulations—a result that should help constrain uncertainties in climate model projections.

Biofuels are often promoted as a way of mitigating climate change, but their impacts on climate and air quality remain uncertain. Estimates of air-pollutant emissions from the production and use of sugar-cane ethanol in Brazil indicate that this biofuel may have larger impacts on regional climate and human health than previously thought.

With expertise in coastal resources and an interdisciplinary background in marine biology and social science, Tim Daw joined a team of natural and social scientists to study how coastal communities are affected by the impacts of climate change on coral reefs.