Volume 5 Issue 7, July 2015

Action needs to be taken to mitigate the effects of climate change on deep-sea ecosystems.

Initiatives to adapt to the effects of climate change are growing in number but may fail to achieve the desired outcomes unless critical competing interests are taken into account during the planning process.

With the charismatic former president of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, behind bars on a widely derided terrorism charge, Anna Petherick asks whether small island states can really make themselves heard in Paris.

Reducing emissions from forests is a key goal of international climate efforts. New research shows how ethnographic approaches can provide better outcomes for people and forests in Asia Pacific.

A focus on African American communities on the Eastern Shore of Maryland highlights the ways that local cultural knowledge differs from place to place, developing understanding of local climate risks and resources for adaptation.

A simple conceptual model helps to answer the question of which forests are more likely to die following droughts.

There have been calls for more voices from the global south to engage in the climate engineering debate. A Berkeley Workshop held in July 2014 achieved just this, identifying themes that should inform research and governance in this arena.

Deep-sea coral reefs off southeast Australia are threatened by climate change and ocean acidification. An immediate priority to conserve these sensitive ecosystems would be the identification and protection of refugia areas.

Policies aimed at mitigating climate change, adapting to it and minimizing its impacts must take into account human behaviours and motivations. Psychology can therefore inform efforts to address climate change, but further research is required.

Climate change is expected to exacerbate absenteeism as a result of heat stress, with ramifications for labour productivity. Reduced work performance in 2013–2014 in Australia was found to represent an economic burden of around US$6.2 billion.

US population exposure to extreme heat is set to increase four- to sixfold from the late twentieth century. Changes in population are as important as changes in climate in driving this outcome.

Dry season rainfall in the Amazon is projected by constraining global climate models with simple models calibrated to observations. The results indicate a longer dry season over a larger area and a strengthening of the monsoon season this century.

A study using a three-dimensional variability space where tropical cyclone frequency, intensity and activity are linked identifies surface ocean temperature as the cause of increased cyclone intensity and a decreased frequency of occurrence.

A manipulation experiment, combined with reconstructed evolutionary history from a dormant egg bank found in recent lake sediments, reveals that water fleas (Daphnia) can exhibit a rapid increase in their capacity to tolerate higher temperatures.

A hydraulic corollary to Darcy’s law is used to predict the characteristics of plants that will survive during drought in a warmer climate. This indicates that forest trees will need to be shorter and more drought-tolerant to survive in the future.

Rapid warming of Arctic marine ecosystems has led to a change in the spatial distribution of fish communities, with boreal communities expanding into regions previously dominated by Arctic fish species, which are now retracting northwards.

Physiological changes associated with dwarfing in two marine molluscs that are adapted to acidified seawater at shallow CO₂ seeps help the animals keep their shells intact. Such changes may have helped species to survive past mass extinction events.

Quantitative indices can only partially help in understanding vulnerability to climate change impacts. Research shows that eliciting cultural knowledge yields important insights into how social–ecological factors affect communities’ vulnerability.

Rising water temperatures increase the susceptibility of reef-building corals to diseases caused by pathogens and to coral bleaching. Model projections indicate that disease is more likely to cause coral mortality than bleaching in coming decades.

Analysis of the sensitivity of marine pelagic biodiversity to past and contemporary climate change shows that even moderate future warming will accelerate changes already being observed, while severe warming will seriously impact biodiversity.