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Large language models offer an opportunity to advance climate and sustainability research. We believe that a focus on regulation and validation of generative artificial intelligence models would provide more benefits to society than a halt in development.
Climate action is urgently needed, with reports appearing regularly highlighting the current state of the planet and scientific understanding of what is to come. There are steps being made that should be celebrated, but more is needed.
Loss and damage funds are intended to support low-income regions experiencing impacts of human-caused climate change. Currently, event attribution should only play a limited role in determining loss and damage spending, but this role could grow as the field advances.
Adaptation is a key societal response to reduce the impacts of climate change, yet it is poorly represented in current modelling frameworks. We identify key research gaps and suggest entry points for adaptation in quantitative assessments of climate change to enhance policy guidance.
Research on organism responses to climate change needs to incorporate biological interactions, which requires consideration of the trade-offs between scale and resolution.
Research using lakes and ponds as model systems contributes both to addressing the freshwater biodiversity crisis and developing general theories and frameworks for understanding how biological systems respond to climate change and other anthropogenic stressors.
Indigenous and Western knowledge ethically combined is uniquely suited to address ongoing climate challenges. To build an environment where Western and Indigenous knowledge systems thrive, funding institutions must value co-production of knowledge and be available to Indigenous experts.