Volume 13 Issue 4, April 2023

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.

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.

The rate of sea-level rise varies around the world, as do local infrastructure and standards for defending against the risks of flooding. Now research indicates that coastal communities can also have very different times left to act before defences fall short of those standards.

Acclimation to climate change induces a reduction in the overall energetic cost for ectotherms, but most studies focus on a single species. Now, research shows that species competition can erode the energetic benefits of acclimation by affecting individual behaviour and energetics.

Achieving net zero means balancing remaining emissions with carbon removal, and understanding the nature and scope of residual emissions is key to planning decarbonized energy and industrial systems. However, our analysis of long-term climate strategies shows that many governments lack clear projections for residual emissions at net zero.

Causal links between plankton taxa were inferred using long-term data from ten Swiss lakes, revealing the effect of warming and nutrient levels on entire ecological networks. The resulting model suggests that warming generally reduces the number of network interactions and alters which taxa control the food webs.

Estimations of the risk from sea-level rise are often based on the amount of property inundated by water. However, risk measurements based on isolation — being cut-off from key services owing to road flooding — suggest that the impacts of sea-level rise could be more widespread and may begin earlier than anticipated.

In this Perspective, the authors argue that the restoration of wild animals and their functional roles can enhance natural carbon capture and storage. They call for the scope of natural climate solutions to be broadened to include animals.

Carbon dioxide removal will be essential to reaching ambitious climate goals by offsetting hard-to-abate emissions and drawing down legacy CO₂. A diverse portfolio of CO₂ removal strategies, rather than any single approach, could achieve gigatonne-scale removals while limiting risks to the water–energy–land system.

Residual emissions, as a noticeable component of net-zero plans, should be analysed transparently and with specificity. By examining the national long-term strategies, the authors find that currently residual emissions are not clearly defined and are unlikely to be balanced by land-based carbon removal.

Sea-level rise poses a considerable threat to many coastal areas as it increases the exceedance probability of local protection infrastructure. Here, the authors propose a method that shows the different timing at which the degree of local protection decreases due to sea-level rise.

Sea-level rise (SLR) projections do not fully consider the influence of internal climate variability (ICV). Using large-ensemble projections, the authors show that including upper-limit ICV results in SLR hotspots in Southeast Asian megacities, and Western Indian and Pacific Oceans.

Climate warming affects permafrost regions, with strong impacts on the environment such as the greening of river plains. Here the authors use satellite data to show that these changes have stabilized large Arctic sinuous rivers by slowing their lateral migration by about 20% over the past half-century.

The authors show in Drosophila species that while developmental acclimation can reduce metabolic costs associated with warming, interspecific interactions can erode this benefit. This suggests that ignoring species interactions may lead to underestimation of metabolic costs under future climates.

The authors investigate the impact of warming and nutrient supply on entire ecological networks within ten Swiss lakes. Warming generally reduces network interactions, particularly under high phosphate, leading to shifts in trophic control of food webs.

Sea-level rise is threatening communities with inundation. This work considers isolation—being cut off from essential services—as a complementary metric that highlights earlier risks from high tides across the coastal United States.

Using data on oxygen variability taken from 32 representative reef sites, the authors show that hypoxia is already common. Under future scenarios of ocean warming and deoxygenation, the duration, intensity and severity of hypoxia will increase, with nearly one-third of reefs experiencing severe hypoxia.