Volume 12 Issue 4, April 2022

Shifts in phenology can impact organism fitness, ecosystem function, and goods and services from nature. Climate change management must better integrate phenology to optimize conservation outcomes as these impacts increase.

Millions of people rely on potentially sustainable harvesting for their income and energy. Yet specious assumptions about deforestation continue to drive ineffective bans on these practices. This occurs at the peril of the climate and the poor.

Jean Combes’s love of nature as a child led her to note the signs of starting spring. Her long-term records are now part of a vital growing citizen science dataset that starkly shows how climate change is shifting the timing of the natural world.

Controversy remains as to whether nuclear power should be part of a sustainable future energy mix. Phasing out nuclear too rapidly could lead to substantial health damages from air pollution.

As the ozone hole begins to heal, concentrations of harmful ground-level ozone are also increasing. Work now shows the impacts that both changes are having on the Southern Ocean and our wider climate system.

Estimating future economic and domestic water use is difficult due to uncertain changes in climate and socioeconomic conditions. Now, research estimates future water use in the United States could decrease or more than double by 2070 under plausible socioeconomic and climate scenarios.

Vast areas of carbon-dense, permafrost peatlands are known to be at risk from warming climates, but models indicate that they are closer to widespread climatic degradation than previously believed. All but the most aggressive climate mitigation scenarios will render these carbon hotspots climatically unsustainable across Europe and Western Siberia within decades.

This novel, three-dimensional approach to marine conservation identifies vertically coherent locations for global marine protected areas in the high seas. Taking a climate-smart approach, this work prioritized the protection of regions with increased biodiversity and reduced climate exposure across different depth domains, to identify sites that deserve protection now and into the future.

Increasing carbon storage through soils could help mitigate climate change and is an important part of many countries’ strategies. The authors review current soil carbon monitoring in the European Union for greenhouse-gas inventories and find that current practices are not accurate enough to measure climate benefits.

Human cooperation, which is essential for climate action, is shaped by the social cognition of individuals. This Review examines three mechanisms that play an important role in discouraging pro-environmental behaviours, but which can also provide effective solutions for collective action.

The current ambition for hydrofluorocarbon emissions reduction by the Kigali Amendment is not sufficient to meet the 1.5 °C Paris Agreement goal. The authors show that a more ambitious Kigali Amendment target could still help in achieving the Paris goal if more countries act early.

Observations show that China is undergoing greater warming than the United States, yet climate models fail to capture the difference in warming trends. The difference in warming is a result of a stronger climate response to external forcing in China.

Co-occurring hot and dry extremes are predicted to increase with global warming. Changes in precipitation will modulate the extent of these changes, highlighting the importance of understanding regional precipitation trends to prepare society and minimize impacts.

Determining the emergent climate change signals in the tropical Pacific—mean state and El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO)—is crucial for climate action. Model simulations show that the mean sea surface temperature signal is already detectable, and that mean rainfall and ENSO-related signals could emerge around 2040.

Between 1955 and 2000 stratospheric ozone decreased and tropospheric ozone increased. Model analysis shows that these ozone changes each drove warming of the Southern Ocean through distinct mechanisms and together account for ~30% of the net subsurface Southern Ocean heat content increases over the same period, with the larger contribution from tropospheric increases.

Permafrost peatlands are thawing, yet the timing and spatial dynamics of thaw are not well constrained. Under moderate and high warming scenarios, permafrost peatlands in Europe and Western Siberia will cross a tipping point where the climate becomes unsuitable, putting their carbon stores at risk.

Despite overall warming, many regions in the Northern Hemisphere have been cooling in autumn. This cooling resulted in an increasing release of net CO₂ 2004–2018 as primary production decreased more than respiration in cooling and respiration increased more than production in warming areas.

Changes in precipitation remains an understudied factor that can impact leaf onset date (LOD) under climate change. The authors show that decreasing precipitation frequency has contributed to LOD advancement, and that incorporating precipitation data projects earlier LOD than currently predicted.

The authors define the global environmental niches of plankton from nano- (viruses) to meso-zooplankton (small metazoans) using metagenomic data. They assess reorganizations under climate change and the environmental drivers of change, with focus on the impacts on nitrogen and carbon fluxes.

Protecting the ocean from increasing threats requires the development of high-seas marine reserve networks. An approach that optimizes biodiversity, minimizes climate change exposure and reduces fisheries conflict enables low-regret climate-smart conservation areas to be identified.