Articles in 2023

Social cost of carbon is the cornerstone of optimal climate policy design and implementation, yet the large uncertainties remain since the first published work. This meta-analysis demonstrates that estimates of the social cost of carbon have increased over time, correcting for inflation and emission year.

The authors investigate the response of Archaea to experimental warming in a tallgrass prairie ecosystem. Warming was linked to reduced diversity and convergent succession, with further links to changed ecosystem function. Stochastic processes dominated community changes but decreased over time.

The authors model historic and current distributions of grassland and heathland plants using both macro- and microclimate data. While macroclimate models predict the need for major range shifts (14 km median), microclimate models predict much smaller shifts that more closely match observed patterns.

Northern peatland carbon sink plays a vital role in climate regulation. Here, the authors show that wildfire reduced peatland carbon uptake and enhanced emissions from degraded peatlands; climate change impacts accelerated carbon losses where increased burn rate and severity reduced carbon sink.

Global runoff is subject to multiple influences with high uncertainties in its projections. The authors show that global runoff is expected to increase mainly due to vegetation and soil moisture responses to rising CO₂ and radiative forcing, rather than through direct effects of climate change.

Environmental drivers of soil carbon and its sensitivity to warming are poorly understood. The authors compare soil samples of paired urban and natural ecosystems and show that under warming, the microbiome is an essential driver of soil carbon in urban greenspace compared with natural ecosystems.

Using a trait-based model that resolves key zooplankton groups, the authors reveal future shifts to food webs dominated by carnivorous and gelatinous filter-feeding zooplankton. Subsequent decreases in food nutrition are linked to declines in small pelagic fish biomass, particularly in tropical regions.

Cost-benefit analysis of climate change depends heavily on the damage function used, and it is difficult to get credible information. Multimodel comparison with newly developed bottom-up damage functions indicates the optimal temperature could be much lower than previously estimated.

The authors investigate the impact of warming and nutrient supply on entire ecological networks within ten Swiss lakes. Warming generally reduces network interactions, particularly under high phosphate, leading to shifts in trophic control of food webs.

Sea-level rise poses a considerable threat to many coastal areas as it increases the exceedance probability of local protection infrastructure. Here, the authors propose a method that shows the different timing at which the degree of local protection decreases due to sea-level rise.

Warming reduces the greenhouse gas sink of pristine wetlands. Here the authors show that carbon dioxide emissions increase in cryptogam sites at higher latitudes, while methane and nitrous oxide emissions are enhanced in vascular-plant-dominated permafrost wetlands.

The authors investigate relationships between various soil stressors that exceed critical thresholds and the maintenance of ecosystem services. They show that multiple stressors crossing a high-level threshold reduces soil functioning and can be consistently used to predict ecosystem functioning.

Climate warming affects permafrost regions, with strong impacts on the environment such as the greening of river plains. Here the authors use satellite data to show that these changes have stabilized large Arctic sinuous rivers by slowing their lateral migration by about 20% over the past half-century.

Carbon dioxide removal will be essential to reaching ambitious climate goals by offsetting hard-to-abate emissions and drawing down legacy CO₂. A diverse portfolio of CO₂ removal strategies, rather than any single approach, could achieve gigatonne-scale removals while limiting risks to the water–energy–land system.

Residual emissions, as a noticeable component of net-zero plans, should be analysed transparently and with specificity. By examining the national long-term strategies, the authors find that currently residual emissions are not clearly defined and are unlikely to be balanced by land-based carbon removal.

The authors show in Drosophila species that while developmental acclimation can reduce metabolic costs associated with warming, interspecific interactions can erode this benefit. This suggests that ignoring species interactions may lead to underestimation of metabolic costs under future climates.

Sea-level rise (SLR) projections do not fully consider the influence of internal climate variability (ICV). Using large-ensemble projections, the authors show that including upper-limit ICV results in SLR hotspots in Southeast Asian megacities, and Western Indian and Pacific Oceans.

When two tropical cyclones make landfall shortly after each other, they can have particularly strong effects on coastal areas. Here the authors show that the frequency of such sequential hazard-producing tropical cyclones is increasing along the US Atlantic and Gulf coasts under climate change.

Removing fossil fuel subsidy could reduce the CO₂ emissions and improve the use of government budget, while the feasibility is in doubt. This research demonstrates the public attitudes in developing countries are not worse than that for carbon tax, and better use of the public fund is preferred.

Natural hazards exacerbated by climate change pose serious risks to property markets in the United States. Ignoring these risks could create instability in housing values. This research shows the magnitude of unpriced flood risk and who stands to lose from housing prices that reflect climate risks.