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Climate change vulnerability assessments are becoming mainstream decision support tools for conservation in the US, but they may be doing migratory species a disservice.
With proper forethought, climate finance could cut gender inequity and consequentially become more economically efficient. But the opposite may happen if funds ignore the issue, warns Anna Petherick.
By exerting a drag on the atmosphere, wind turbines convert a fraction of the atmosphere's kinetic energy to electrical energy. To find the point of diminishing returns, a new study adds so much drag to a simulated atmosphere that the winds slow to a crawl.
Economic arguments, such as saving money, are often used to promote pro-environmental actions — for example, reducing energy use. However, research shows that people's environmental motives are sometimes better drivers of behavioural change.
Carbon capture and storage is a climate mitigation technology designed to reduce emissions from fossil-fuel power plants and industrial sources. This Perspective argues that the very limited implementation of carbon capture and storage technology so far is largely the result of political, economic and social factors, rather than a technological inability to deliver.
Society's response to climate change is inevitably mediated by culture. In a Review Article that analyses important new research from across the social sciences, climate change is shown to threaten important cultural dimensions of people's lives and livelihoods — including material and lived aspects of culture, identity, community cohesion and sense of place.
Wind power is a near-zero-emissions source of energy. Although at present wind turbines are placed on the Earth’s surface, high-altitude winds offer greater possibilities for power generation. This study uses a climate model to estimate power generation for both surface and high-altitude winds, and finds that the latter provide much more power, but at a possible climate cost. However, there are unlikely to be substantial climate effects in meeting the present global demand.
Campaigns to promote pro-environmental behaviour usually emphasize self-interested reasons for engaging with a self-transcendent cause such as protecting the environment. However, psychological evidence suggests that this approach may fail to stimulate other, different, environmental behaviours. Research shows that communicating self-transcending motives for car-sharing increases recycling rates, whereas presenting self-interested reasons alone, or combined with self-transcending motives, does not.
This study investigates uncertainties in impact assessments when using climate projections. The uncertainties in health-related metrics combining temperature and humidity are much smaller than if the uncertainties in the two variables were independent. The finding reveals the potential for joint assessment of projection uncertainties in other variables used in impact studies.
Emissions from landscape fires affect both climate and air quality. This study uses satellite-derived fire estimates and atmospheric modelling to quantify the effects on health from fire emissions in southeast Asia from 1997 to 2006. Strong El Nino years are found to increase the incidence of fires, in addition to those caused by anthropogenic land use change, leading to an additional 200 days per year when the WHO atmospheric particle target is exceeded and increase adult mortality by 2%. Reducing regional deforestation and degradation, and thereby forest fires caused by land use change would therefore improve public health.
Prediction of how climate-altered flooding regimes will affect stream channels and their communities has been limited by a lack of long-term baseline data sets across different organismal groups. Research based on 30 years of monitoring data now shows that salmon, macroinvertebrate and meiofauna communities display markedly different responses following a major flooding event.
Climate-induced range shifts have been detected in a number of European species for which long-term survey data are available. In North America, well-organized long-term data needed to document such shifts are much less common. Now observations made by ‘citizen scientists’ help to demonstrate that a major, climate-induced shift of North American butterflies is underway.
Few studies have considered the effects of changes in climatic variability on disease incidence. Now research based on laboratory experiments and field data from Latin America shows that frog susceptibility to the pathogenic chytrid fungus is influenced by temperature variation and predictability through effects on host and parasite acclimation.
Blanket bog—characterized by an almost complete landscape covering of undecayed organic peat—is a highly distinctive biome restricted to regions that experience hyperoceanic climatic conditions. Bioclimatic modelling suggests there will be a dramatic shrinkage of the available climatic space for blanket bogs with only a few, restricted areas of persistence.
Ocean acidification can alter competitive dynamics between species. Although calcareous species recruited and grew at similar rates to fleshy seaweeds in ambient and low pH conditions, at later stages, in low pH, they were rapidly overgrown. These results suggest that changes in competitive balance could indirectly lead to profound ecosystem changes in an acidified ocean.
Increased dissolved inorganic nitrogen (DIN) concentrations in sea water have been linked to a reduction of the temperature threshold at which corals bleach, however, the mechanism underlying this change is not known. This phenomenon is now explained in terms of increased phosphatase activities and imbalanced DIN supply resulting in phosphate starvation of algael symbionts.
Comprehensive computer simulations show that coral reefs are likely to suffer extensive long-term degradation resulting from mass bleaching events even if the expected increase in global mean temperature can be kept well below 2 °C. Without major mitigation efforts to limit global warming significantly, the fate of coral reef ecosystems seems to be sealed.
