News & Comment

Framing solutions to climate change as natural strongly influences their acceptability, but what constitutes a ‘natural’ climate solution is selected, not self-evident. We suggest that the current, narrow formulation of natural climate solutions risks constraining what are thought of as desirable policy options.

A failure to recognize the factors behind continued emissions growth could limit the world’s ability to shift to a pathway consistent with 1.5 °C or 2 °C of global warming. Continued support for low-carbon technologies needs to be combined with policies directed at phasing out the use of fossil fuels.

Many recently updated climate models show greater future warming than previously. Separate lines of evidence suggest that their warming rates may be unrealistically high, but the risk of such eventualities only emphasizes the need for rapid and deep reductions in emissions.

Misleading claims about mass migration induced by climate change continue to surface in both academia and policy. This requires a new research agenda on ‘climate mobilities’ that moves beyond simplistic assumptions and more accurately advances knowledge of the nexus between human mobility and climate change.

Minimizing the adverse consequences of sea-level change presents a key societal challenge. New modelling is necessary to examine the implications of global policy decisions that determine future greenhouse gas emissions and local policies around coastal risk that influence where and how we live.

Moving whole communities away from the coastline sounds like a remote possibility. But as sea levels rise, relocation might be an increasingly inevitable, though challenging, option.

By many accounts, climate change is already driving human migration, but fresh thinking about the consequences of increasingly stringent borders, the intervening effects of global and local policy and how best to characterize human adaptive responses is needed to properly understand whether a crisis is on the horizon.

Though critical to many projected pathways to meet global climate targets, the challenges facing biomass energy with carbon capture and storage have yet to enter the forefront of public dialogue.

The broad-scale impacts and mechanisms of physical climate change are scientifically well-understood, but specific estimates of these impacts are associated with uncertainty that is challenging to communicate. How scientists communicate uncertainty affects public trust and acceptance of the research.

Future emissions scenarios for the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report should explore the carbon budget space in a systematic manner, which would be robust to the updates of latest climate science, so that policy implications can be adequately assessed.