Climate-change impacts articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors show that a regularly used temperature extreme metric leads to a systematic underestimation of the expected extreme frequency of up to − 75% and propagates to other derived metrics. A simple bias correction is presented to eliminate this error.

    • Lukas Brunner
    •  & Aiko Voigt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This work leverages a new diet database and six long term monitoring efforts of 361 taxa to build comparable pre- and post-heatwave ecosystem models. The study provides empirical demonstration of changes in ecosystem-wide patterns of energy flux and biomass in response to marine heatwaves.

    • Dylan G. E. Gomes
    • , James J. Ruzicka
    •  & Joshua D. Stewart

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Global warming targets are considered inadequate to protect coral reefs, but this prognosis is based on models with similar approaches. This systematic review of studies that project coral responses to climate change found that divergent modelling methodologies had discrepancies in coral reef outcomes, and that those used for climate change syntheses may project more severe consequences than other methods.

    • Shannon G. Klein
    • , Cassandra Roch
    •  & Carlos M. Duarte

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Climate change and plastic pollution are interconnected global challenges. Rising temperatures and moisture alter plastic characteristics, contributing to waste, microplastic generation, and release of hazardous substances. Urgent attention is essential to comprehend and address these climate-driven effects and their consequences.

    • Xin-Feng Wei
    • , Wei Yang
    •  & Mikael S. Hedenqvist

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In a first global analysis, researchers find that sandy shores are severely squeezed between human infrastructure and the rising sea, as on average, the first road or building is currently situated at just 390 meters distance from the shoreline.

    • Eva M. Lansu
    • , Valérie C. Reijers
    •  & Tjisse van der Heide

  • Perspective
    | Open Access

    Climate change could drive critical parts of the Earth system past tipping points, causing large-scale, abrupt and/or irreversible changes that harm societies. Here, the authors suggest that satellite remote sensing can play a unique role in helping manage these profound risks, by providing improved early warning of tipping points across scales.

    • Timothy M. Lenton
    • , Jesse F. Abrams
    •  & Niklas Boers

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Flooding impacts billions globally and indirect health effects are not sufficiently examined, especially for women in developing countries. Here, the authors show that flood exposure during pregnancy correlates with a higher risk of pregnancy loss, particularly for marginalized women, revealing increased health disparities in a changing climate.

    • Cheng He
    • , Yixiang Zhu
    •  & Haidong Kan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Zuiderveen and colleagues find that emerging bio-based products have on average 45% lower greenhouse gas life cycle emissions compared to their fossil counterparts, yet, there is a large variation between individual bio-based products with none of them reaching netzero emissions.

    • Emma A. R. Zuiderveen
    • , Koen J. J. Kuipers
    •  & Mark A. J. Huijbregts

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Using historical data across the U.S., the authors find that population declines are associated with flood exposure. Projecting this relationship to 2053, the authors find that flood risk may result in 7% lower growth than otherwise expected.

    • Evelyn G. Shu
    • , Jeremy R. Porter
    •  & Edward Kearns

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The geographic distribution of dengue has been expanding in recent decades, and Vietnam is one of the most severely affected countries. In this study, the authors use Bayesian hierarchical modelling to investigate the socio-environmental and climatic drivers of dengue incidence in Vietnam and how they vary across the country.

    • Rory Gibb
    • , Felipe J. Colón-González
    •  & Rachel Lowe

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ronco and colleagues analyze disaster-induced movements in the presence of floods, storms, and landslides during 2016–2021, providing empirical evidence that differential vulnerability exists and quantifying its extent. They achieve this by employing explainable machine learning techniques to model and understand internal displacement flows and patterns from observational data.

    • Michele Ronco
    • , José María Tárraga
    •  & Gustau Camps-Valls

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The estimates of the societal costs of carbon currently used for policy evaluations may be too low due to an insufficient representation of tropical cyclone damage. Accounting for them substantially increases the estimated benefits of climate change mitigation measures.

    • Hazem Krichene
    • , Thomas Vogt
    •  & Christian Otto

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The record-breaking ozone holes of recent years contribute to a steady decline of mid-spring ozone in the Antarctic, contrary to signs of early-spring recovery. Changes in descending air at the core of the ozone hole might be the driver.

    • Hannah E. Kessenich
    • , Annika Seppälä
    •  & Craig J. Rodger

  • Article
    | Open Access

    By analyzing historical and Argo observations, the authors find that the warming of mode and intermediate water layers drives most of the global upper 2000 m ocean warming, highlighting the outsized heat uptake by regional water masses in both hemispheres.

    • Zhi Li
    • , Matthew H. England
    •  & Sjoerd Groeskamp

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors identify four main types of vertical structures of marine heatwaves, with different impact depths and spatio-temporal distributions, that are influenced by multiscale ocean dynamical processes.

    • Ying Zhang
    • , Yan Du
    •  & Alistair J. Hobday

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here the authors find economic damage from El Niño far greater than benefits from La Niña on the global economy, leading to an increased economic loss as ENSO variability intensifies under greenhouse warming.

    • Yi Liu
    • , Wenju Cai
    •  & Ying Zhang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study examines the effect of four marine heatwaves in the Northeast Pacific on the distributions of 14 top predators, revealing a wide-array of predator responses both among and within heatwaves. Predator responses were highly predictable, demonstrating capacity for early warning systems of heatwave impacts, similar to weather forecasts.

    • Heather Welch
    • , Matthew S. Savoca
    •  & Elliott L. Hazen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The high-resolution global model of soil temperature and snow cover change in mountain ecosystems developed here shows that areas nearby glaciers are warming faster than other mountain regions, and these effects are particularly rapid in tropical mountains.

    • Silvio Marta
    • , Anaïs Zimmer
    •  & Gentile Francesco Ficetola

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Estimating health burden of air pollution against the background of population aging is of significance for achieving Sustainable Development Goal 3.9. Here, the authors show that population aging is expected to be the leading contributor to increased deaths attributable to PM2.5 in China by 2035, which will counter the positive gains achieved by improvements in air pollution and healthcare.

    • Fangjin Xu
    • , Qingxu Huang
    •  & Brett A. Bryan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The risk of heat-mortality is increasing sharply. The authors report that heat-mortality levels of a 1-in-100-year summer in the climate of 2000 can be expected once every ten to twenty years in the current climate and at least once in five years with 2 °C of global warming.

    • Samuel Lüthi
    • , Christopher Fairless
    •  & Ana M. Vicedo-Cabrera

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Marine heatwaves and mass bleaching mortality events threaten the persistence of coral communities on tropical reefs. This study demonstrates that the thermal tolerance of coral communities in Palau has likely increased since the late 1980s. Such ecological resilience could reduce future bleaching impacts if global carbon emissions are cut down.

    • Liam Lachs
    • , Simon D. Donner
    •  & James R. Guest

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Soil moisture–atmosphere coupling induces non-linear warming via the ‘warmer climate – drier soil’ feedback, which exerts an accelerating effect on global warming and on extremely high temperatures.

    • Liang Qiao
    • , Zhiyan Zuo
    •  & Kaiwen Zhang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Turbulence is an important ventilator of near-surface pollution but is also influenced by it. Here we find that turbulence is likely to increase with mitigating black carbon emissions, providing an added positive impact in highly polluted regions.

    • Camilla W. Stjern
    • , Øivind Hodnebrog
    •  & Ignacio Pisso

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This paper presents a method for quantifying the benefits of beaches in reducing storm and long-term coastal flood risk. This method can contribute to cost-effective decision-making on climate change adaptation in many of the world’s coasts.

    • Alexandra Toimil
    • , Iñigo J. Losada
    •  & Gonéri Le Cozannet

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Tree growth in boreal forests is generally predicted to increase under warming. Here, the authors demonstrate a method to analyze physiologically informed temperature series of tree-ring data, finding potentially overlooked growth-temperature responses and projecting increasing risks of warming to boreal larch forests.

    • Wenqing Li
    • , Rubén D. Manzanedo
    •  & Neil Pederson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The global risk of record-breaking heatwaves is assessed, with the most at-risk regions identified. It is shown that record-smashing events that currently appear implausible could happen anywhere as a result of climate change.

    • Vikki Thompson
    • , Dann Mitchell
    •  & Julia M. Slingo

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