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Purposeful action leading to significant structural and/or functional changes — known as transformational adaptation — may be required to adapt agriculture to the changing climate. Now, research shows that strong access to knowledge and weak social ties (social capital) empowers individuals to plan and implement novel farming strategies and options.
Climate change mitigation and adaptation are human-mediated processes but global modelling tools currently take no account of human responses to environmental change. In this Perspective the authors propose the agent functional type approach to advance the representation of these processes.
2014 is a critical year for preparing for the 2015 deadline to settle a new international agreement on measures to tackle climate change. This Perspective offers a number of compromises designed to help overcome the present impasse in global climate negotiations.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued guidelines for communicating probabilities with words, but readers all over the world think the words mean something different.
Identification of long-term changes in periods of extreme heavy and weak rainfall during the Indian monsoon season has been elusive. Now, an observational study provides the firmest evidence so far.
Most studies assume that temperature trends are linear. Now, research demonstrates that warming trends are nonlinear, that warming accelerated over most of the twentieth century and is much stronger since 1980 than calculated by linear methods.
Over short periods of time, it can be difficult to isolate sea-level increase in observations as it is hidden by natural shifts in rainfall quantities over ocean and land, which cause temporary drops in the global sea-level curve. Now research shows how to detect the signal, even in short records, by estimating these variations.
Management practices applied to existing types of land cover can influence the local climate as much as a conversion to a different type of plant cover.
Temperature reconstructions of the past millennium rely heavily on Northern Hemisphere data. Now a Southern Hemisphere temperature reconstruction is available and sheds light on the complexity of the interhemispheric temperature relationship.
Accounting for time-dependent mechanisms in greenhouse gas radiative forcing and evaluating the performance of mitigation technologies in the context of climate stabilization targets can better inform technology choices today and in the future.
An up-to-date synthesis of climate change impacts on crop yields shows that the bounds of uncertainty are increasing. So why do estimates of the effect of climate change on crop productivity differ so much?
From 1974 to 1976, an unexpected large hole appeared in the Weddell Sea winter sea-ice cover, a consequence of ocean heat carried to the sea surface by convection. This may have been a window to the past, as model analysis suggests anthropogenic climate change will diminish the chances of a repeat performance.
Relative to the scale of the problem, climate policies worldwide have failed. Now research explains why policy innovations are often inadequate, routinely reflecting the aversion of policymakers to the risk of failure.
The various supply chains that deliver the services society needs are often managed in silos. Research now shows the advantages of integrated management.
