Research articles

The authors assess the productivity of conservation agriculture systems for eight major crops under current and future climate using a global-scale probabilistic machine-learning approach, revealing substantial differences in yield gain probabilities across crop type, management practice, climate zone and geography.

Climate change communication is more likely to persuade when the message and the messenger resonate with the audience’s values and identities. A campaign field experiment testing online messages tailored to US Republicans increased their climate change beliefs, risk perceptions and issue importance.

The climate impact of water-table drawdown in peatlands is unclear as carbon dioxide emissions increase and methane emissions decrease due to drying. This study shows decreasing water-table depth results in net greenhouse gas emissions from global peatlands, despite reducing methane emissions.

Exploring how biodiversity and climate change are interlinked, the authors show that limiting warming could maintain tree diversity, avoiding primary productivity loss. Countries with greater climate change economic costs benefit most: a potential triple win for climate, biodiversity and society.

Using measurements from 139 global lakes, the authors demonstrate how long-term thermal habitat change in lakes is exacerbated by species’ seasonal and depth-related constraints. They further reveal higher change in tropical lakes, and those with high biodiversity and endemism.

Understanding the temperature sensitivity of soil respiration is critical to determining soil carbon dynamics under climate change. Spatial heterogeneity in controls highlights the importance of interactions between vegetation, soil and climate in driving the response of respiration to warming.

CMIP6 models simulate higher and more accurate cloud liquid water fraction relative to CMIP5, but both ensembles overestimate warm cloud precipitation. Correcting these warm cloud processes in a model exposes compensating biases large enough to offset CMIP5–CMIP6 climate sensitivity differences.

Current and future climate change is expected to impact human health, both indirectly and directly, through increasing temperatures. Climate change has already had an impact and is responsible for 37% of warm-season heat-related deaths between 1991 and 2018, with increases in mortality observed globally.

Prediction of current and future species distributions using thermal limits often relies on lethal temperatures, yet many organisms lose fertility at sublethal temperatures. The authors show that distributions of 43 Drosophila species better match male-sterilizing, than lethal, temperatures.

Coastal sea levels are impacted by local vertical land motion plus local and remote changes to ocean circulation, density and mass changes. Tide-gauge records are used to reconstruct the coastal sea-level budget over nine regions, showing its variability has been dominated by ocean circulation since 1960.

The authors model the role of algal symbiont shuffling and evolution in coral resilience to warming and ocean acidification, globally. They find that shuffling is more effective than evolution, and show global patterns of vulnerability due to the interaction of warming rate and adaptive capacity.

Using mechanistic models that incorporate visual foraging and temperature-driven physiology for two fish types, the authors reveal how latitudinal light gradients, which are not affected by climate change, can constrain warming-related shifts to high latitudes.

Marine low clouds cool the planet, but their response to warming is uncertain and dominates the spread in model-based climate sensitivities. Observational constraints suggest smaller cloud feedbacks than previously reported and imply a more moderate climate sensitivity.

Climate change impacts precipitation patterns, and thus the risk for drought. Damages from drought in Europe will increase with losses more than €65 billion per year in a scenario without climate mitigation; keeping warming below 2 °C avoids most impacts.

The amount of carbon stored in African ecosystems and how climate change will affect this is uncertain. Projections indicate that carbon storage will increase in East Africa, climate change will have an overall negative impact on woody biomass and that other human pressures will amplify the trend.

Global warming-driven deglaciation in high-mountain Asia raises the likelihood of natural dam failure and associated glacial lake outburst flood risk. This is estimated for lake development under present-day and future warming scenarios, highlighting emerging hotspots and transboundary impacts.

Carbon loss from forests occurs through deforestation or the degradation of existing forest. The loss of forest area in the Brazilian Amazon was higher in 2019 than following drought and an El Niño event in 2015, yet degradation drove three times more biomass loss than deforestation from 2010 to 2019.

Disturbance regimes from fire, drought, harvest and insects will probably intensify in the future and under climate change. Despite partial offsets from regrowth, disturbance from fire and harvest reduces carbon uptake and storage in boreal forests, impacting the strength of this carbon sink.

There is a mismatch between emission estimates from global land use calculated from IAMs and countries’ greenhouse gas inventories. This study presents a method for reconciling these estimates by reallocating part of the land-use sink, facilitating progress assessment towards climate goals.

Mesoscale eddy variability has increased in eddy-rich regions by 2–5% per decade but decreased in the tropical ocean over the satellite record (1993–2020). These changes will impact ocean–atmosphere heat and carbon exchange, with implications for regional and global climate.