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Brazil's hosting of the much anticipated Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development this month will put the country in the climate change spotlight.
As host to the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, Brazil will draw international attention to its policy on climate change, but the measures announced so far are not commensurate with the recently set reduction goal.
Predictions of a 40–140% increase in wheat yield by 2050, reported in the UK Climate Change Risk Assessment, are based on a simplistic approach that ignores key factors affecting yields and hence are seriously misleading.
Shale gas can be a powerful tool in combating climate change. However, its exploitation may also lead to undesired environmental effects that can conversely worsen climate change.
Industrial symbiosis — the sharing of by-product resources among diverse industries — can reduce costs and improve the environment. But despite its benefits, it is no panacea.
Market-based mechanisms to tackle climate change have many advocates, but economic conditions are making emissions trading schemes hard to implement and sustain, explains Sonja van Renssen.
Ice-sheet loss is a likely effect of human interference with the climate system. Research shows that the disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet could occur close to, or even below, the target of limiting warming to 2 °C above pre-industrial levels.
Climate change is now occurring, but few people consider how long the effects may last. A study emphasizes the long-term climate effects of present-day emissions.
It is commonly assumed that fossil fuels can be replaced by alternative forms of energy. Now research challenges this assumption, and highlights the role of non-technological solutions to reduce fossil-fuel consumption.
Immobility rather than mobility should be the focus of concern for policymakers worried about the impact of climate-related natural hazards on the livelihoods of rural populations.
This Perspective describes techniques for quantifying uncertainties in climate projections in terms of a common framework, whereby models are used to explore relationships between past climate and climate change and future projections.
This Review discusses current knowledge regarding agriculture as a source for nitrous oxide — a major greenhouse gas. It offers an outlook on future developments about the consequences of increasing use of biofuels and the potential importance of aquaculture, as well as options for mitigation.
Comparison of global-scale measurements of subsurface ocean temperature taken during the epic voyage of HMS Challenger (1872–1876) with data collected by the Argo Programme over the past eight years shows that oceans have been warming at least since the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century.
A comprehensive stability analysis shows that the critical global temperature rise that leads to collapse of the Greenland ice sheet is only 1–2 °C above the pre-industrial climate state, which is significantly lower than previously believed.
This study addresses the importance of systematic biases in regional and global climate models. Simulations for the central Mediterranean region show that, unless a bias-correction method is applied, individual models significantly overestimate regional amplification of global warming.
This paper reports results from a laboratory experiment designed to quantify the reduction of snow albedo by black carbon. The study aims to test models of radiative transfer in snow and the parameterizations from them that are used in climate models.
Analysts implicitily assume that increasing renewable-energy generation by one unit displaces conventional energy by the same amount. Research now shows that, owing to the complexity of our socio–economic systems, each unit of total national non-fossil-fuel energy use displaced less than one-quarter of a unit of fossil-fuel energy use over the past 50 years.
Despite 20 years of concern about human migration in response to environmental pressure, estimates of the numbers likely to move as a result of climate change remain, at best, guesswork. Now computer simulations reveal complex interactions in the way that climate and demographic changes combine to influence migration, suggesting that we should expect some surprises.
How effective are protected areas for conserving biodiversity in a rapidly changing world? A study shows that the network of protected areas in Mexico’s cloud forests—a biome with high species richness and a large fraction of endemics—is almost completely redundant in a changing climate.
Satellite data suggest that contemporary climate warming has already resulted in increased productivity and shrub biomass over much of the Arctic, but plot-level evidence for vegetation transformation remains sparse. Now research provides plot-scale evidence linking changes in vascular plant abundance to local summer warming in widely dispersed tundra locations across the globe.
Feedbacks can modulate the way plants respond to warming, but difficulties in detecting long-acting feedbacks complicate understanding of the climatic effects on community structure and function beyond initial responses. Now a mesocosm experiment shows that although warming initially increased aboveground net primary productivity in grassland ecosystems, the response diminished progressively over time.
Focusing on New York City, this study investigates the impact of climate change on hurricane storm surges. The analysis shows that the frequency of surge-flooding events is likely to increase greatly owing to the combined effects of storm-climatology change and sea-level rise.
Environmental social scientist Lindsay C. Stringer worked with ecologists, soil and climate scientists, economists, and livelihood and policy experts to examine carbon storage, livelihoods and ecosystem services in subSaharan Africa's drylands.
