Volume 11 Issue 6, June 2021

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.

Improving agricultural activity data is a cost-effective option for reducing the uncertainty of greenhouse gas inventories and monitoring mitigation actions, meeting multiple national data needs, and bolstering investments. It’s time to direct effort to this opportunity.

Mortality associated with rising temperatures is one of the clearest and impactful fingerprints of a changing climate. Research now shows an attributable increase in mortality due to climate change is already evident in cities on every continent.

Recent changes to how clouds are represented in global models, especially over the Southern Ocean, resulted in increased climate warming. Correcting rain processes in a model shows improved cloud representation but leads to a greatly enhanced negative feedback, offsetting documented increases in model climate sensitivity.

Lakes are warming globally at variable rates with important consequences for species survival. Now, research quantifies change in thermal habitat of lakes around the world and shows that season or depth restrictions on species responses may increase thermal habitat change threefold.

There is no common structure for the way national emissions scenarios are created, hindering efforts for comparison and analysis at the larger scale. This Perspective presents a framework to guide individual national scenario creation in a standardized way.

Prediction of current and future species distributions using thermal limits often relies on lethal temperatures, yet many organisms lose fertility at sublethal temperatures. The authors show that distributions of 43 Drosophila species better match male-sterilizing, than lethal, temperatures.

Climate change impacts precipitation patterns, and thus the risk for drought. Damages from drought in Europe will increase with losses more than €65 billion per year in a scenario without climate mitigation; keeping warming below 2 °C avoids most impacts.

Current and future climate change is expected to impact human health, both indirectly and directly, through increasing temperatures. Climate change has already had an impact and is responsible for 37% of warm-season heat-related deaths between 1991 and 2018, with increases in mortality observed globally.

Marine low clouds cool the planet, but their response to warming is uncertain and dominates the spread in model-based climate sensitivities. Observational constraints suggest smaller cloud feedbacks than previously reported and imply a more moderate climate sensitivity.

CMIP6 models simulate higher and more accurate cloud liquid water fraction relative to CMIP5, but both ensembles overestimate warm cloud precipitation. Correcting these warm cloud processes in a model exposes compensating biases large enough to offset CMIP5–CMIP6 climate sensitivity differences.

Coastal sea levels are impacted by local vertical land motion plus local and remote changes to ocean circulation, density and mass changes. Tide-gauge records are used to reconstruct the coastal sea-level budget over nine regions, showing its variability has been dominated by ocean circulation since 1960.

Using measurements from 139 global lakes, the authors demonstrate how long-term thermal habitat change in lakes is exacerbated by species’ seasonal and depth-related constraints. They further reveal higher change in tropical lakes, and those with high biodiversity and endemism.

Using mechanistic models that incorporate visual foraging and temperature-driven physiology for two fish types, the authors reveal how latitudinal light gradients, which are not affected by climate change, can constrain warming-related shifts to high latitudes.

The authors model the role of algal symbiont shuffling and evolution in coral resilience to warming and ocean acidification, globally. They find that shuffling is more effective than evolution, and show global patterns of vulnerability due to the interaction of warming rate and adaptive capacity.

Exploring how biodiversity and climate change are interlinked, the authors show that limiting warming could maintain tree diversity, avoiding primary productivity loss. Countries with greater climate change economic costs benefit most: a potential triple win for climate, biodiversity and society.