Articles in 2021

Assessing the cost of climate change mitigation is essential to policy-making, yet for many the perception remains that meeting climate goals will entail economic loss. This Perspective unpacks key aspects of mitigation cost estimates to clarify interpretation and discussion of costs.

Soybean and maize yields in the Amazon-Cerrado region of Brazil are dependent on water from rain. Warming and drying will make the climate less suitable for agricultural production; changes have already moved 28% of croplands out of their optimum climate space.

Heat extremes threaten the health of urban residents with particularly strong impacts from day–night sustained heat. Observation and simulation data across eastern China show increasing risks of compound events attributed to anthropogenic emissions and urbanization.

As climate change impacts are felt more and more around the world, adapting to change is becoming critical. However, it is not clear whether actions being taken are effective in reducing risk and increasing resilience, and access to financing is crucial.

Climate change is threatening agricultural productivity and the welfare of farmers. Increasing employment in non-farm sectors could mitigate such negative impacts, especially in developing countries.

Assessing the global implementation of climate adaptation is critical. Now, research quantifies where adaptation is happening and where gaps remain.

Trade liberalization in the early 21st century increased the adaptation capacity of global food systems to climate change; further liberalization and trade facilitation could help to avoid dozens of millions being undernourished at mid-century. The global trade agenda should explicitly include climate change adaptation to achieve SDG 2 Zero Hunger.

Southern salmon populations face increased risk from a warming climate. New analysis of salmon ear bones shows outsized reliance on rarely used cold-water habitat for population survival through drought years — habitat that is expected to shrink under climate change.

Civil society has an important role to play in climate action. Nature Climate Change speaks to Chidi Oti-Obihara, investment banker turned climate activist, about how he found his role in the discussion.

Subscriptions to a free, weekly deforestation alert system available on the simple interface Global Forest Watch reduced deforestation in the protected areas and logging concessions of tropical African forests. This suggests that freely available near-real-time forest monitoring systems can help reduce emissions from deforestation if they are integrated with forest policies.

We find that the public prefers the costs of climate action to be constant over time, irrespective of whether average costs are low or high. Policymakers interested in combating global warming should therefore introduce policies that initially rely on stable cost schedules instead of the widely discussed alternative of ramping up costs over time.

Using a multi-sector model of human and natural systems, we find that the nationwide cost from state-varying climate policy in the United States is only one-tenth higher than that of nationally uniform policy. The benefits of state-led action — leadership, experimentation and the practical reality that states implement policy more reliably than the federal government — do not necessarily come with a high economic cost.

Determining progress in adaptation to climate change is challenging, yet critical as climate change impacts increase. A stocktake of the scientific literature on implemented adaptation now shows that adaptation is mostly fragmented and incremental, with evidence lacking for its impact on reducing risk.

Highlighting the importance of rare phenotypes in population persistence, the authors show that spring-run Chinook salmon late-migrant juveniles were critical for cohort success in drought and ocean heatwave years. Combined further warming and impassable dams threaten these late migrants’ survival.

Improvements in public transport are often regarded as essential to combat climate change. A study investigating the Chinese high-speed rail system suggests that these benefits could operate through channels other than those that one might expect.

Intercity high-speed rail (HSR) can have large climate benefits with its high energy efficiency. This study explores the substitution effects of HSR on road traffic in China, which can be translated to an annual reduction of 14.76 million tons of CO₂-equivalent emissions.