Research articles

The authors show that estuarine and coastal vegetation are collectively a greenhouse gas (GHG) sink for the atmosphere, but methane and nitrous oxide emissions counteract the carbon dioxide uptake. Critical coastal GHG sink hotspots are identified in Southeast Asia, North America and Africa.

Although many countries have strengthened their emissions reduction pledges, their ability to limit the warming outcomes is still in question. A multimodel analysis demonstrates that these trajectories are in line with the 2 °C target but countries probably face feasibility challenges to achieve them.

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.

Sea-level rise is threatening communities with inundation. This work considers isolation—being cut off from essential services—as a complementary metric that highlights earlier risks from high tides across the coastal United States.

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.

Atmospheric methane concentrations are increasing and a process-based model now estimates greater methane emissions from wetlands since 2007 than previous studies. Substantial increases in 2020 and 2021 contributed to record-high growth rates in the atmospheric methane burden.

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.

Using data on oxygen variability taken from 32 representative reef sites, the authors show that hypoxia is already common. Under future scenarios of ocean warming and deoxygenation, the duration, intensity and severity of hypoxia will increase, with nearly one-third of reefs experiencing severe hypoxia.

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.