News & Comment

Private insurance is a key component of strategies to manage physical climate change impacts, but existing scenarios used by insurers are not well suited to making business decisions. We call for a complementary normative approach, based on business objectives, that delivers actionable information to decision-makers.

This month marks 10 years since the first issue of Nature Climate Change. In this issue, we reflect on developments in research areas over those years and celebrate some memorable papers published in our pages.

In celebration of the tenth anniversary of Nature Climate Change, past and present editors reminisce about some of the papers that stood out.

Weather and climate service providers around the world are looking to issue assessments of the human role in recent extreme weather events. For this attribution to be of value, it is important that vulnerability is acknowledged and questions are framed appropriately.

About 12 months into the COVID-19 pandemic, its immediate and lasting impacts on the climate system and fossil fuel economy are now better understood. These insights will be fundamental to the global recovery — and ideally the green transitions that accompany it — but the implementation will be hard-won.

The 2009 pledge to mobilize US$100 billion a year by 2020 in climate finance to developing nations was not specific on what types of funding could count. Indeterminacy and questionable claims make it impossible to know if developed nations have delivered; as 2020 passes, opportunity exists to address these failures in a new pledge.

The ocean connects all corners of the Earth. It supports life, and we need to better understand and support it to ensure a prosperous future.

For its green transition, the EU plans to fund the development of digital twins of Earth. For these twins to be more than big data atlases, they must create a qualitatively new Earth system simulation and observation capability using a methodological framework responsible for exceptional advances in numerical weather prediction.

Reduced complexity climate models are useful tools with practical policy applications, yet evaluation of their performance and application is nascent. We call for stakeholder-driven development and assessment to address user needs, including provision of open-source code and guidance to inform model selection and application.