Volume 14 Issue 6, June 2024

Global projections of the economic impacts of climate change have usually focused on rising average temperatures. Now, two studies depict more complex and gloomier scenarios by incorporating variability in temperature and precipitation.

Long-term monitoring is required to determine whether climate change is having an impact on shallow geohazard frequency and magnitude; however, these records rarely exist. An innovative approach, using tree damage as evidence, suggests climate change has shifted the seasonality of alpine rockfalls as well as increasing their frequency and volume.

Meeting the Paris Agreement targets requires deep emissions reductions supported by a scale-up in carbon dioxide removal. However, current country-reported mitigation pledges are off track to meet carbon dioxide removal needs, unless countries dramatically reduce emissions consistent with low-energy-demand scenarios.

Our multi-model analysis of international shipping shows the potential for decreasing global annual emissions in the coming decades, up to a reduction of 86% by 2050. Drop-in biofuels, renewable alcohols and green ammonia stand out as the main substitutes for conventional maritime fuels.

A comprehensive analysis of observations and model simulations finds that future global mean warming is likely to be larger than previously thought, and that limiting global warming to well below 2°C will be more difficult than previously anticipated.

The material-intensive transition to low-carbon energy will impose environmental and social burdens on local and regional communities. Demand-side strategies can help to achieve higher well-being at lower levels of energy or material use, and an interdisciplinary approach in future research is essential.

It has been postulated that there is a threshold temperature above which permafrost will reach a global tipping point, causing accelerated thaw and global collapse. Here it is argued that permafrost-thaw feedbacks are dominated by local- to regional-scale processes, but this also means there is no safety margin.

How climate services support on-farm management is not well understood. Here research shows that multi-decadal projections help farmers better identify future climate risks through reducing complexity and psychological distance, although this may be impeded by lack of confidence in data.

Existing global economic damage assessments only focus on the impacts induced by annual temperature changes. Including variability and extremes of temperature and precipitation in climate damage projections raises global gross domestic product losses and exacerbates global disparities of economic damage.

International maritime shipping accounts for an important proportion of global CO₂ emissions, but its role in a world with deep decarbonization has not been thoroughly examined. Through a multi-model comparison, this study reveals the necessity of reducing and stabilizing emissions from this sector in the next few decades.

Internal variability can strongly influence global temperature trends. Here the authors show that if the internal variability in the eastern tropical Pacific is removed from recent trends, the constrained projected warming with future CO₂ emissions is higher than currently expected.

Projections of Arctic warming have large uncertainties. Here the authors consider ocean heat transport and its contribution to Arctic warming; high-resolution model results show increased Bering Strait transport compared with lower-resolution results, with implications for projected warming rates.

Hydrological sensitivity describes how much precipitation changes for a given warming. Here, the authors show that the hydrological sensitivity differs between the three tropical ocean basins, which influences land rainfall changes across the tropical and mid-latitude regions.

Polluted water contributes to water scarcity. Here the authors project water demands, availability and quality under climate and socio-economic changes and show that 56–66% of the global population will be exposed to clean water scarcity at the end of the century.

The authors use individual-based models to assess the contribution of frugivore-mediated seed dispersal to forest restoration. They show that the movement of large birds—which disperse seeds with higher carbon storage potential—is limited in landscapes with low forest cover (<40%).

Carbon dioxide removals (CDR) have been integrated into country-submitted reports under the Paris Agreement. However, this Analysis finds a gap between levels of CDR in these national proposals and the scenarios limiting global warming to the 1.5 °C target.

Methane emissions from abandoned mines have been underestimated in emissions inventories even though they may become a dominant source of emissions as coal is phased out. Using a detailed bottom-up dataset, the authors find that a strategy targeting the closure of gas-rich mines could have a large mitigation potential