Earth and environmental sciences articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Climate action from local actors is vital in achieving nationally determined contributions under the Paris Agreement. Here the authors show that existing commitments from U.S. states, cities and business could reduce emissions 25% below 2005 levels by 2030, with expanded subnational action reducing emissions by 37% and federal action by up to 49%.

    • Nathan E. Hultman
    • , Leon Clarke
    •  & John O’Neill

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Marine records indicate a greenhouse to icehouse climate transition at ~34 million years ago, but how the climate changed within continental interiors at this time is less well known. Here, the authors show an orbital climate response shift with aridification on the northeastern Tibetan Plateau during this time.

    • Hong Ao
    • , Guillaume Dupont-Nivet
    •  & Zhisheng An

  • Article
    | Open Access

    China issued the Dual Credit policy to improve vehicle efficiency and accelerate new energy vehicle adoption. Here the authors show that the total Greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) of the Chinese passenger vehicle fleet are expected to peak in 2032 and a significant reduction in GHG emissions is possible by optimizing the Dual Credit policy.

    • Xin He
    • , Shiqi Ou
    •  & Michael Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Whether or not species—when introduced to a new location—eventually become invasive has been linked to the specices’ capacity to expand its niche. However, here the authors show that the extent of niche shift is smaller in non-invasive than invasive ant species, questioning this established hypothesis.

    • Olivia K. Bates
    • , Sébastien Ollier
    •  & Cleo Bertelsmeier

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Monsoon systems have strong impacts on precipitation and food security over large areas of the world. Here, the authors show that plant responses to rising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere play a key role in modulating seasonal rainfall and water resources over global land monsoon regions.

    • Jiangpeng Cui
    • , Shilong Piao
    •  & Gabriel J. Kooperman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The COVID-19 pandemic has stopped many human activities, which has had significant impact on emissions of greenhouse gases. Here, the authors present daily estimates of country-level CO2 emissions for different economic sectors and show that there has been a 8.8% decrease in global CO2 emissions in the first half of 2020.

    • Zhu Liu
    • , Philippe Ciais
    •  & Hans Joachim Schellnhuber

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Coastal systems have enormous carbon-sequestering potential, but any positive climate effects can be countered by methane emissions. Here the authors use sea level rise manipulation mesocosms in tidal wetlands to show that shifts in plant community composition have the greatest effect on methane emissions.

    • Peter Mueller
    • , Thomas J. Mozdzer
    •  & J. Patrick Megonigal

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Protected areas (PAs) are the most important conservation tool, yet assessing their effectiveness is remarkably challenging. We clarify the links between the many facets of PA effectiveness, from evaluating the means, to analysing the mechanisms, to directly measuring biodiversity outcomes.

    • Ana S. L. Rodrigues
    •  & Victor Cazalis

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Unconventional oil and gas production has increased drastically in the US, but its environmental impacts are not well known. Here, the authors show that these wells can be associated with elevated levels of airborne particle radioactivity in downwind locations.

    • Longxiang Li
    • , Annelise J. Blomberg
    •  & Petros Koutrakis

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The Si cycle is important to ocean productivity and nutrient cycling, however there are uncertainties in global budgets. Here the authors use a multi-isotope approach on seafloor sediments and pore fluids, finding that an unappreciated source of Si to the ocean is the degradation of seafloor serpentinites.

    • Sonja Geilert
    • , Patricia Grasse
    •  & Catriona D. Menzies

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How the abrupt warming events recorded in Greenland ice cores during the last glacial cycle have influenced the tropical climate is not well known. Here the authors present new lake sediment data from the Peruvian Andes that shows that these events resulted in rapid glacier retreat and large reductions in lake level.

    • Arielle Woods
    • , Donald T. Rodbell
    •  & Joseph S. Stoner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors show that seismogenic faults can be activated by stress perturbations by all possible modes of slip independently of the frictional properties. They demonstrate, that the nature of seismicity is mostly governed by the initial stress level along the faults.

    • François X. Passelègue
    • , Michelle Almakari
    •  & Marie Violay

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study investigates the effect of changing sea level on deep sea gas emissions in the Arctic. The results show that small decreases in sea-level favors gas release. This implies that sea-level rise may partially counterbalance the effect of warming oceans on gas emissions overall.

    • Nabil Sultan
    • , Andreia Plaza-Faverola
    •  & Jochen Knies

  • Article
    | Open Access

    There are many available ways to rank species for conservation prioritization. Here the authors identify species of mammals and birds that are both spatially restricted and functionally distinct, finding that such species are currently insufficiently protected and disproportionately sensitive to current and future threats.

    • Nicolas Loiseau
    • , Nicolas Mouquet
    •  & Cyrille Violle

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Few palaeoclimate archives beyond the polar regions preserve continuous and datable paleotemperature proxy time series over multiple glacial-interglacial cycles. Here, the authors show that Mg concentrations in a subaqueous speleothem from an Italian cave track regional sea-surface temperatures over the last 350,000 years.

    • Russell Drysdale
    • , Isabelle Couchoud
    •  & Jon Woodhead

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors estimate the damages associated with global temperature variability. They find that variability in temperature leads to substantial uncertainty about damages, which imposes costs equivalent to a large fraction of annual consumption today.

    • Raphael Calel
    • , Sandra C. Chapman
    •  & Nicholas W. Watkins

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Switching and relocating crops could be a key pathway for agricultural adaptation to climate change. Here, Rising and Devineni use data-driven Bayesian modelling to estimate the potential for crop switching to mitigate climate impacts on US crop production under a high-emission scenario, showing considerable opportunities but also limitations.

    • James Rising
    •  & Naresh Devineni

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Pegmatite crystals are thought to grow rapidly, yet their growth rates and conditions are not well constrained. Here, the authors find that the trace element distributions of pegmatitic quartz crystals indicate rapid growth in highly dynamic environments, suggesting that large meter-scale crystals can be formed within days.

    • Patrick R. Phelps
    • , Cin-Ty A. Lee
    •  & Douglas M. Morton

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Climate warming is advancing spring leaf unfolding, but it is also reducing the cold periods that many trees require to break winter dormancy. Here, the authors show that 7 of 12 current chilling models fail to account for the correct relationship between chilling accumulation and heat requirement, leading to substantial overestimates of the advance of spring phenology under climate change.

    • Huanjiong Wang
    • , Chaoyang Wu
    •  & Quansheng Ge

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Implementation of Central European electricity targets will redistribute regional benefits and burdens. Here the authors show that the aims of cost-efficiency, regional equality, and renewable electricity generation have vastly different implementation pathways, impacts, and trade-offs.

    • Jan-Philipp Sasse
    •  & Evelina Trutnevyte

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Carbon stored in the Arctic is threatened by climate change, but models do not capture the local-scale heterogeneity that influences carbon dynamics. Here the authors refine tundra models to account for heterogeneity, finding improved projections and decreased uncertainty in assessing the fate of carbon.

    • M. J. Lara
    • , A. D. McGuire
    •  & S. D. Wullschleger

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ice nucleating particles impact the global climate by altering cloud formation and properties, but the sources of these emissions are not completely characterized. Here, the authors show that secondary organic aerosols formed from the oxidation of organic gases in the atmosphere can be a source of ice nucleating particles.

    • Martin J. Wolf
    • , Yue Zhang
    •  & Daniel J. Cziczo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Which vapors are responsible for new particle formation in the Arctic is largely unknown. Here, the authors show that the formation of new particles at the central Arctic Ocean is mainly driven by iodic acid and that particles smaller than 30 nm in diameter can activate as cloud condensation nuclei.

    • Andrea Baccarini
    • , Linn Karlsson
    •  & Julia Schmale

  • Perspective
    | Open Access

    In this Perspective, the authors review the different applications for mobile phone data to support COVID-19 pandemic response, the relevance of these applications for infectious disease transmission and control, and potential sources and implications of selection bias in mobile phone data.

    • Kyra H. Grantz
    • , Hannah R. Meredith
    •  & Amy Wesolowski

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Coastal river delta regions are particularly impacted by the effects of climate change, yet though these regions are densely inhabited, robust estimates of population are lacking. Here the authors use global datasets to predict the number of people and regions most threatened by flooding and extreme weather.

    • Douglas A. Edmonds
    • , Rebecca L. Caldwell
    •  & Sacha M. O. Siani

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Dryness stresses vegetation and can lead to declines in productivity, increased emission of carbon, and plant mortality, but the drivers of this stress remain unclear. Here the authors show that soil moisture plays a dominant role relative to atmospheric water demand over most global land vegetated areas.

    • Laibao Liu
    • , Lukas Gudmundsson
    •  & Sonia I. Seneviratne

  • Article
    | Open Access

    There are gaps in international efforts to monitor the wildlife trade, with many species potentially being undetected by the established monitoring groups. Here the authors use an automated web search to document the sale of reptiles online, revealing over 36% of all known reptile species are in trade, including many missing from official databases.

    • Benjamin M. Marshall
    • , Colin Strine
    •  & Alice C. Hughes

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Most driver models were designed for specific scenario. Here, the authors developed a driver behaviour model that can be applied to multiple scenarios and show that human-like driving behaviour emerges when the Driver’s Risk Field is coupled to a controller that maintains the perceived risk below a threshold level.

    • Sarvesh Kolekar
    • , Joost de Winter
    •  & David Abbink

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The ecological niche of a given microbe is difficult to define, but can be approximated from the range of biochemical reactions encoded by its genome. Here the authors use these genomic data and analyze them using manifold learning, which generates a diffusion map of the metabolic niche space of over 2500 bacteria.

    • Ashkaan K. Fahimipour
    •  & Thilo Gross

  • Article
    | Open Access

    As low-carbon energy technologies advance, markets are driving demand for energy transition metals, increasing the stress placed on people and the environment in extractive locations. Here, the authors quantify this stress by developing a set of global composite environmental, social and governance risk indicators, and find that 84% of platinum resources and 70% of cobalt resources are located in high-risk contexts.

    • Éléonore Lèbre
    • , Martin Stringer
    •  & Rick K. Valenta

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Transport properties of melts in the deep Earth have dictated the evolution of the early Earth’s magma oceans and also govern many modern dynamic processes, such as plate tectonics. Here, the authors find there is a reversal in the trends of transport properties of basaltic melts at pressures near 50 GPa, with implications for the timescales of early Earth’s magma oceans.

    • Arnab Majumdar
    • , Min Wu
    •  & John S. Tse

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Exposure to extreme events is a major concern in coastal regions where human populations and stressed ecosystems are at risk to such phenomena. Here the authors show a marine heatwave on the continental shelf resulted from a novel set of compounding effects due to a tropical storm followed by an atmospheric heatwave.

    • B. Dzwonkowski
    • , J. Coogan
    •  & T. Lee

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A significant part of the subpolar North Atlantic has warmed less over the past century than the rest of the global ocean, a feature called the North Atlantic warming hole. Here, the authors show that this anomaly can be explained by remote atmospheric forcing from the rapidly warming Indian Ocean.

    • Shineng Hu
    •  & Alexey V. Fedorov

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Satellites provide clear evidence of greening trends in the Arctic, but high-resolution pan-Arctic quantification of these trends is lacking. Here the authors analyse high-resolution Landsat data to show widespread greening in the Arctic, and find that greening trends are linked to summer warming overall but not always locally.

    • Logan T. Berner
    • , Richard Massey
    •  & Scott J. Goetz

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How to best allocate limited resources for conserving imperilled species is a difficult challenge. Here the authors analyse data on over 2000 threatened species from USA, Australia, and New Zealand, finding that on average half of the budget is allocated to research and monitoring. Species with higher budget allocation to research and monitoring tend to have poorer recovery outcomes.

    • Rachel T. Buxton
    • , Stephanie Avery-Gomm
    •  & Joseph R. Bennett

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The intermittency of solar resources is one of the primary challenges for the large-scale integration of the renewable energy. Here Yin et al. used satellite data and climate model outputs to evaluate the geographic patterns of future solar power reliability, highlighting the tradeoff between the maximum potential power and the power reliability.

    • Jun Yin
    • , Annalisa Molini
    •  & Amilcare Porporato

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Salvage logging has become a common practice to gain economic returns from naturally disturbed forests, but it could have considerable negative effects on biodiversity. Here the authors use a recently developed statistical method to estimate that ca. 75% of the naturally disturbed forest should be left unlogged to maintain 90% of the species unique to the area.

    • Simon Thorn
    • , Anne Chao
    •  & Alexandro B. Leverkus

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Due to legislative shortfalls, species of global conservation concern can still be captured in commercial fisheries. Here the authors show that 91 threatened species are reported in catch/landing databases, 13 of which are traded internationally despite their conservation concern.

    • Leslie A. Roberson
    • , Reg A. Watson
    •  & Carissa J. Klein

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Microbes interact in different ways than macro-organisms, but their interactions can still form the basis for broader macroecological patterns like the Species Abundance Distribution. Here, the author shows that thre general ecological patterns can be found in microbes, within and across biome types.

    • Jacopo Grilli

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The early Eocene was characterized by exceptionally high global temperatures and no polar ice. Here, clumped isotope paleothermometry of glendonite calcite from the Danish Basin shows that these were formed in waters below 5 °C, indicating that regionalised cool episodes punctuated the background warmth of the early Eocene.

    • Madeleine L. Vickers
    • , Sabine K. Lengger
    •  & Christoph Korte

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Proxy reconstructions show a decreasing trend from the Middle to Late Holocene, which conflicts with model results showing an increasing trend. Statistical analysis of model output shows that these conflicting results originate from two distinct modes of variability, which dominate at different regions and times.

    • Jürgen Bader
    • , Johann Jungclaus
    •  & Martin Claussen

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