Volume 11 Issue 5, May 2021

Restoration of forest cover can curtail the climate crisis and provide many co-benefits, or waste limited resources. To use restoration of forest cover to its highest potential, global dynamic monitoring is needed that combines existing restoration projects with control plots and remote-sensing technologies.

Initiatives to protect carbon sinks are crucial to mitigate climate change and avert its worst effects. Advancing the rights of women and forest-dependent communities will strengthen these initiatives and enable them to have greater impact.

Forests play a key role in plans to mitigate climate change and reach carbon neutrality by sequestering and offsetting anthropogenic emissions. Nature Climate Change spoke to representatives from Tribal Carbon and If Not Us Then Who about the role that Indigenous peoples living in forest communities play in climate mitigation.

Across the globe, increasing tree cover is a popular solution to offset carbon emissions. Replenishing trees is only part of the answer, and scientists seek an increased role as part of a multi-layered policy approach.

Thawing Arctic permafrost, and release of its stored carbon, is a known amplifier of global warming. Now research suggests an increase in Arctic lightning could speed up the permafrost’s demise.

Mountain snowpack in western North America is decreasing, and these trends are often reported using amount of maximum annual snowpack. An alternative metric — integrated snowmelt during the accumulation season — finds snowmelt decreases are three times more widespread, suggesting even stronger snow decline.

The Global Stocktake of the Paris Agreement measures progress towards a net-zero emissions goal. Now, research provides a way to improve representation of land-based contributions to greenhouse gas emissions and removals to properly assess collective progress.

E-fuels—hydrocarbon fuels synthesized from green hydrogen—can replace fossil fuels. This Perspective highlights the opportunities and risks of e-fuels, and concludes that hydrogen and e-fuels should be prioritized for sectors inaccessible to direct electrification.

Evaluation of climate adaptation policies typically compares differences between scenarios with different levels of, or without, climate change. Many policies, however, address development simultaneously, and focusing only on climate change impacts may not identify the best outcome.

Mesoscale eddy variability has increased in eddy-rich regions by 2–5% per decade but decreased in the tropical ocean over the satellite record (1993–2020). These changes will impact ocean–atmosphere heat and carbon exchange, with implications for regional and global climate.

Changes in lightning activity are uncertain under climate change. The authors project that summer lightning in the Arctic is likely to more than double by the end of the century, with implications for lightning-strike tundra wildfires and associated carbon release from permafrost.

Global warming-driven deglaciation in high-mountain Asia raises the likelihood of natural dam failure and associated glacial lake outburst flood risk. This is estimated for lake development under present-day and future warming scenarios, highlighting emerging hotspots and transboundary impacts.

Mountain snowpack declines are often tracked using snow water equivalent trends sensitive to highly variable precipitation. Observational work proposes temperature-driven daily snowmelt during the accumulation season as an alternative metric, with increases that are three times more widespread.

There is a mismatch between emission estimates from global land use calculated from IAMs and countries’ greenhouse gas inventories. This study presents a method for reconciling these estimates by reallocating part of the land-use sink, facilitating progress assessment towards climate goals.

Disturbance regimes from fire, drought, harvest and insects will probably intensify in the future and under climate change. Despite partial offsets from regrowth, disturbance from fire and harvest reduces carbon uptake and storage in boreal forests, impacting the strength of this carbon sink.

Carbon loss from forests occurs through deforestation or the degradation of existing forest. The loss of forest area in the Brazilian Amazon was higher in 2019 than following drought and an El Niño event in 2015, yet degradation drove three times more biomass loss than deforestation from 2010 to 2019.

The amount of carbon stored in African ecosystems and how climate change will affect this is uncertain. Projections indicate that carbon storage will increase in East Africa, climate change will have an overall negative impact on woody biomass and that other human pressures will amplify the trend.