Volume 7 Issue 6, June 2017

A requirement for unique author identifiers will enable clearer tracking of scientific contributions.

Increasing demand for solution-oriented environmental assessments brings significant opportunities and challenges at the science–policy–society interface. Solution-oriented assessments should enable inclusive deliberative learning processes about policy alternatives and their practical consequences.

Early-stage capital providers and clean energy technology incubators are supporting a new wave of innovations focused on end-use efficiency and demand control. This wave complements expanding investments in supply technologies required for electricity sector decarbonization.

Estimates of the social cost of carbon vary widely as a function of different ethical parameters. Faced with values ranging from US$10 to US$1,000 per tCO₂ and above, some perplexed policymakers have adopted 'target-consistent' carbon pricing instead.

Fire weather indices are unsuited to forecast fire in tropical rainforests. Now research shows the area burnt across Borneo is related to drought-depleted water tables, presenting the opportunity to predict fire danger in these environments.

Warming induced by greenhouse gases will increase the amount of moisture in the atmosphere, causing heavier rainfall events. Changing atmospheric circulation dynamics are now shown to either amplify or weaken regional increases, contributing to uncertainty in future precipitation extremes.

Land surface models show large divergences in simulating the terrestrial carbon cycle. Atmospheric observations of the tracer carbonyl sulfide allow selection of the most realistic models.

Changes in forest disturbance are likely to be greatest in coniferous forests and the boreal biome, according to a review of global climate change effects on biotic and abiotic forest disturbance agents and their interactions.

Quantification of the economic costs of the urban heat island effect for the main cities around the world. The cost–benefit analyses for some mitigation options are presented and their contribution to the global mitigation efforts is discussed.

The signal to noise ratio of temperature change can be used to determine exposure to unusual, unfamiliar and unknown climates. For large groups of the world’s population, mitigation can delay the onset of unfamiliar or unknown climates by several decades.

Limiting warming to 1.5 °C is expected to lessen the risk of extreme events, relative to 2 °C. Considering Australia, this work shows a decrease of about 25% in the likelihood of record heat, both air and sea surface, if warming is limited to 1.5 °C.

Limiting average global warming to 2 °C will not limit regional warming to the same levels. This study shows drylands have warmed, and will continue to warm, more than the humid lands that are primarily responsible for emissions.

Regional projections of daily extreme precipitation are uncertain, but can be decomposed into thermodynamic and dynamic contributions to improve understanding. While thermodynamics alone uniformly increase extreme precipitation, dynamical processes introduce regional variations.

Predictions of fire-burnt areas are typically based on climate data. Including hydrological processes in models improves projections of burnt area in Borneo, with large wildfires clustered in years of hydrological drought associated with strong El Niño events.

Greening—increasing leaf area index—affects regional climate in a number of contradictory ways. The net global effect is now revealed to be cooling that has offset the equivalent of 12% of global land-surface warming over the past 30 years.

It is difficult to objectively evaluate climate negotiation outcomes. This study shows that climate negotiation participants are pessimistic about the specific approach of voluntary pledges, but are optimistic about the general usefulness of negotiations, particularly if they are more involved.

The social cost of carbon (SCC) is usually calculated by an approach that gives less importance to future generations and does not consider well-being distribution. This study presents an alternative that takes these aspects into account.

Using carbonyl sulfide as a tracer, gross primary production in the Midwest USA is shown to significantly exceed that of any other region of North America. This approach provides a valuable means of assessing the regional accuracy of ecosystem land models.