Volume 9 Issue 1, January 2019

Nature Climate Change has asked Polina Ermolaeva and Irina Kuznetsova, Midori Aoyagi, Shah Md Atiqul Haq and Shih-Yun Kuo to share their insights about public perceptions of climate change in Russia, Japan, Bangladesh and Taiwan, respectively.

Correcting misperceptions provides an opportunity to reduce household GHG emissions across multiple domains. Now research shows that consumers greatly underestimate emissions from foods, but these misperceptions can be successfully corrected with carbon labelling.

For years, theory and model simulations have strongly disagreed on whether global warming will lead to scarcer or more plentiful water supplies. An elegant study now supplies the missing theoretical piece, strengthening the case that global water resources will increase in a warmer world.

Global climate change governance has seen an increase in action beyond national governments. This Perspective sets forth a research agenda and recommendations for evaluating non-state and subnational climate mitigation action.

Investors are increasingly asking businesses to disclose their climate risk and corresponding management strategies. A review of corporate adaptation strategies reveals limited consideration of broader risks to supply chains, customers and employees.

The Madden–Julian Oscillation (MJO) is the leading mode of intraseasonal variability in the tropical atmosphere. This Perspective examines how the MJO may change with anthropogenic warming, revealing a projected increase in MJO-related precipitation.

Ice loss from Antarctica contributes to global sea-level rise. Analysis of ice core records and reanalysis datasets reveals that increased snowfall over the Antarctic Ice Sheet has offset contemporary sea-level rise by ~10 mm since 1901.

The increasing frequency of marine heatwaves suggests that the impacts of successive events may be influenced by previous events. The extent of the 2016 and 2017 bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef shows that ecological memory played a role in the impacts of the second heatwave.

This paper introduces a modification to the Penman–Monteith equation—for net evapotranspiration—to account for vegetation under elevated atmospheric CO₂. In so doing it reconciles contradictions between drought indices and modelled runoff projections.

Nearly two decades of data from a boreal forest soil warming experiment (+5 °C) show no significant increase in aboveground biomass accumulation beyond an initial transitory response.

Consumer adoption of more plant-based diets has high technical potential to reduce global GHG emissions. This study shows that consumers underestimate the GHG emissions associated with foods, but carbon labels that provide this information promote the purchase of lower-emitting options.

Sea-ice expansion around Antarctica, and related surface cooling, is shown to be linked to natural long-term variability of Southern Ocean convection. Model simulations reproduce the observed trends, if they start from an active phase of convection.

Agricultural CH₄ and N₂O emissions represent around 11% of total anthropogenic GHGs. Here agriculture mitigation potentials are quantified, in the context of the 1.5 °C target, and decomposed by emission source, region and mitigation mechanism.

Global net ecosystem production (NEP) from a number of atmospheric inversions and dynamic global vegetation models is analysed to attribute trends to potential drivers. CO₂ is found to have a positive effect on NEP that is constrained by climate warming.