Volume 14 Issue 7, July 2024

Adaptation evidence and knowledge are diverse and unequally represented in global adaptation discourse. The Adaptation Futures 2023 conference sought to bring this diversity together to advance more inclusive and impactful adaptation science, and confronted both the benefits and the trade-offs that this effort entails.

To accept carbon pricing, citizens desire viable alternatives to fossil fuel-based options. As inflation and higher interest rates have exacerbated access barriers for capital-intensive green substitutes, the political success of carbon pricing will be measured by how well policy design enables consumers to switch.

Projections of the future climate of small island states and territories are currently limited by the coarse resolution of models. We call for rapid global and regional cooperation to develop projections compatible with small island scales, providing relevant local information and decision-making tools.

Small island states and territories are often seen as particularly vulnerable to climate change, which affects the shape of the land, its ecosystems and the resources that people depend on. Nature Climate Change asked a selection of scientists from different island states and territories to discuss the role that climate science and action has in supporting island communities.

Effective climate action requires understanding of the contribution of individual actions, firms and industries to greenhouse gas emissions. Now a study illustrates widespread misestimations of emission impacts and reveals underlying psychological processes.

Maternal exposure to ambient heat during pregnancy has been shown to increase the risk for several adverse birth outcomes. Now research reveals that variations of ambient temperature during pregnancy and childhood could have a long-term impact on a child’s brain development.

Observational data suggest a dramatic increase in the salinity contrast between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans over the course of the past half-century. Ocean dynamical processes driven by winds and warming, in addition to surface freshwater fluxes, make important contributions to basin-scale changes in ocean salinity.

In a global-scale study, we investigated the contribution of individual and multiple global change stressors to soil carbon variables, which revealed that an increasing number of global change stressors will reduce the amount of carbon in soils, challenging their capacity to mitigate climate change.

Urban areas are an important focus for effective climate action in the coming decade. This Perspective proposes transformational strategies to accelerate and upscale the impact of the planned Special Report on Climate Change and Cities in the IPCC seventh assessment cycle.

Carbon removal using carbon capture and storage (CCS) remains controversial. This study finds that cross-border CO₂ transport would hinder public acceptance of CCS, associated with the perceived unfairness.

Addressing the consequences of climate change requires political attention and leadership. However, this study shows that apart from Green parties, political parties do not increase their attention to environmental issues following extreme weather events.

Water scarcity is becoming increasingly severe under climate change, and women often bear most of the burden of collecting water. This research finds that both temperature rises and reduced precipitation increase women’s daily water collection time, thereby undermining their welfare globally.

Individual actions are important to reduce emissions, yet consumers’ carbon incompetence may lead to ineffective efforts. This study demonstrates the consistent inaccuracy in assessing emissions of behaviours, firms and industries, which may be driven by lack of information or expertise.

Moving towards net-zero emissions requires carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies, which bring environmental and socioeconomic risks. This study reveals that demand and technological interventions in hard-to-abate sectors help to achieve net-zero targets with less reliance on CDR.

Ocean salinity changes are thought to be dominated by freshwater fluxes. Here the authors show that amplification of the Atlantic–Pacific salinity contrast also involves wind- and ocean warming-driven processes, with larger salinity increases in the North Atlantic, relative to the North Pacific.

How the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) changes has strong effects on tropical regions. Here the authors show that while the ITCZ moves northwards over the first one to two decades of CO₂ emissions, the long-term migration is southward, linked to delayed surface warming in the Southern Ocean.

Soil carbon storage is vulnerable to various climatic and anthropogenic global change stressors (for example drought, warming, land-use intensification). Here the authors show that multiple stress factors act simultaneously to reduce soil carbon storage and persistence across global biomes.

The authors quantify how climate change-related disturbances—drought, fires and insect outbreaks—impact the sensitivity of primary productivity to subsequent water stress. They show significant increases in sensitivity following drought and fire, leading to decreased terrestrial carbon uptake.

The authors use a mechanistic microclimate model to model the below-canopy conditions for 300,000 tropical forest locations across 30 years. They show that small temperature increases have already resulted in novel temperature regimes across most sites, and highlight areas that may act as refugia.

Using magnetic resonance imaging assessment of 2,681 children from the Netherlands, the authors investigate effects of cold and heat exposure during pregnancy, infancy and childhood. They found that these exposures can have lasting impacts on white matter microstructure at preadolescence.