Articles in 2018

The combination of nutrient enrichment and warming has a synergistic effect on rates of methane ebullition from experimental lakes. This suggests methane emissions from shallow lakes may be significantly underestimated.

The fashion industry has changed rapidly in recent years with the increased prevalence of fast fashion, impacting the environment. Efforts to green this polluting industry require action from businesses and consumers.

Photosynthesis is the foundation for almost all known life, but quantifying it at scales above a single plant is difficult. A new satellite illuminates plants’ molecular machinery at much-improved spatial resolution, taking us one step closer to combined ‘inside–outside’ insights into large-scale photosynthesis.

Climate change could increase fire risk across most of the managed boreal forest. Decreasing this risk by increasing the proportion of broad-leaved tree species is an overlooked mitigation–adaption strategy with multiple benefits.

Completely stopping fossil fuel use may not be enough to avoid dangerous climate change. Recent research on the mitigation potential of conservation, restoration, and improved land management demonstrates that natural solutions can reduce emissions and remove atmospheric CO₂ while safeguarding food security and biodiversity.

Assessing the dynamics of resilience could help insurers and governments reduce the costs of climate-risk insurance schemes and secure future insurability in the face of an increase in extreme hydro-meteorological events related to climate change.

Investors will play a major role, whether active or passive, in climate change mitigation. To enable prudent decision-making, we propose three physically based engagement principles that could be used to assess whether an investment is consistent with a long-term climate goal.

The Paris Agreement is based on emission scenarios that move from a sluggish phase-out of fossil fuels to large-scale late-century negative emissions. Alternative pathways of early deployment of negative emission technologies need to be considered to ensure that climate targets are reached safely and sustainably.

Some of the predicted impacts of climate change on crops may be avoided by exploiting existing crop diversity. This Perspective examines this possibility for wine grapes where about 1% of diversity accounts for more than 80% of cultivated areas in some countries.

Apparent temperature, the perceived temperature from air temperature, humidity and wind combined, is projected to increase faster than air temperature. Thermal discomfort will see greater increases in summertime, outweighing wintertime decreases.

Arid regions are projected to expand in the future. An ensemble of climate model simulations reveals that limiting anthropogenic warming to 1.5 °C instead of 2 °C can markedly reduce the area undergoing, and thus the population exposed to, aridification.

One of the greatest sources of uncertainty about future climate change is the path greenhouse gas emissions will take. Now research using a coupled model of human behaviour and climate finds that individual behaviour can significantly alter emissions trajectories and global temperature.

A present-day bias identified in climate projections means that future tropical rainfall may be underestimated. This bias can be addressed by constraining projections with observations.

Human behaviour is an important driver of emissions. A system-dynamics model that couples a psychological model of behaviour with a model of emissions and climate change shows that behaviour can influence global temperature in the year 2100 by up to 1.5 °C.