Volume 8 Issue 3, March 2018

Well-intended climate actions are confounding each other. Cities must take a strategic and integrated approach to lock into a climate-resilient and low-emission future.

Meeting the ambitions of the Paris Agreement will require rapid and massive decarbonization of cities, as well as adaptation. Capacity and requirement differs across cities, with challenges and opportunities for transformational action in both the Global North and South.

The Sustainable Development Goals provide a window of opportunity for creating multidimensional operational approaches for climate change adaptation in cities.

The Paris Agreement highlights the need for local climate leadership. The University Of California’s approach to deep decarbonization offers lessons in efficiency, alternative fuels and electrification. Bending the emissions curve globally requires efforts that blend academic insights with practical solutions.

People are influenced by second-order beliefs — beliefs about the beliefs of others. New research finds that citizens in the US and China systematically underestimate popular support for taking action to curb climate change. Fortunately, they seem willing and able to correct their misperceptions.

Environmental scarcity caused by climate change has been implicated as a driver of violent conflict. Now, research shows significant bias in the regions analysed for climate–conflict links. This may limit understanding of the socioeconomic and political conditions in which such conflict occurs, and how these conflicts could be prevented.

The most commonly used method for representing lightning in global atmospheric models generally predicts lightning increases in a warmer world. A new scheme finds the opposite result, directly challenging the predictive skill of an old stalwart.

Flood impact and recovery is influenced by behavioural responses. This Perspective describes how integrating human behaviour and risk perception into flood-risk assessment models may improve identification of effective risk-management strategies.

A systematic review shows that climate–conflict research tends to focus on a few accessible regions characterized by violent conflict rather than those most vulnerable to climate change, which may inflate the perceived prevalence of links between climate change and violent conflict.

Meeting mitigation targets requires domestic action and international cooperation. This study uses game-theoretic modelling to understand carbon-market linkages and to show the conditions that facilitate global coalition formation.

It has been suggested that lightning activity will increase with anthropogenic warming. However, the use of a physically based lightning parameterization—incorporating cloud ice fluxes—reveals global flash rates in 2100 may decrease by 15% under RCP8.5.

Satellite measures of vegetation greenness, together with animal stocking data and key climatic factors, reveal interannual precipitation variability to be a significant constraint on global pasture productivity.

Agricultural soils can be targeted for carbon (C) sequestration. Research considering C and nitrogen (N) dynamics confirms that significant CO₂ mitigation can be achieved, but after 20–30 years N inputs also need controlling to prevent the C sequestration being offset by N₂O emissions.

A synthesis of animal phenology shows that temperature primarily drives mid-latitude responses, with precipitation important at lower latitudes. Phylogeny and body size are associated with the strength of phenological shifts.

The complexity of ecosystems could influence how warmer waters and acidification affect marine biota. In this study, whilst individual behaviours were affected by increased CO₂, community dynamics buffered the impacts on fish and crustaceans.

Large-scale sea-level rise is primarily dominated by thermal expansion and ice melt. However, wave processes are found to significantly influence local sea-level trends at the coast, amplifying or reducing steric and eustatic contributions.

Annual mangrove carbon stocks are quantified (2000–2012) at global, national and sub-national levels, together with global carbon emissions resulting from deforestation. Two percent of global mangrove carbon was lost between 2000 and 2012.

Ecological niche modelling of king penguins in the Southern Ocean, validated with population genomics and palaeodemography data, is used to reconstruct past range shifts and identify future vulnerable areas and potential refugia under climate change.

Models of the distribution of North American mammals show that estimated future diversity under climate change is drastically underestimated unless the full historical distribution of species is included in the models.

In the version of this Article previously published, technical problems led to the wrong summary appearing on the homepage, and an incorrect Supplementary Information file being uploaded. Both errors have now been corrected.