Articles

River floods that occur simultaneously in multiple locations can lead to higher damages than individual events. Here, the authors show that the likelihood of concurrent high river discharge has increased over the last decades.

Coastal risk assessment under future climate change is important for effective adaptation, but multidimensional analyses are still rare. Here the researchers find that inappropriate development policies could have a greater effect on exposure to flooding than sea-level rise up to 2100 in China.

Wildland fires are becoming more frequent in high-latitude regions. Here the authors show that these fires delay the formation of snow cover in the Arctic, which will be exacerbated under future warming due to increases in burned areas.

Coastal settlement retreat reflects human behavioural adaptation to increasing coastal climate hazards. Using night-time light data over 1992–2019, this study finds that over half of global coastal settlements have retreated, driven by insufficient infrastructure protection and adaptive capacity.

ChatGPT provides a way of teaching people about climate change. This research reveals that conversations between climate sceptics and ChatGPT reduced climate scepticism, but these effects are modest, inconsistent across studies and prone to decay over time.

Climate change will raise the severity and frequency of forest disturbance, damaging the economic value of timber. Researchers show Europe’s timber-based forestry could lose up to €247 billion, yet in some regions the increase in forest productivity could offset these shocks.

How evapotranspiration changes with warming is not well understood. Here the authors show that when often-neglected land–atmosphere feedbacks are considered, evapotranspiration increases less than currently projected by offline models.

The authors combine tracking and body mass data from five migratory waterfowl species to understand their capacity to accelerate migration in response to earlier spring. They show considerable scope for faster migration by reducing the fuelling time before departure and subsequently on stopovers

Few studies have evaluated how climate change may affect dietary habits and nutritional health. Here, using transaction data in the USA, the authors show that added sugar consumption increases with temperature, especially between 12 °C and 30 °C, with stronger effects among lower-income and lower-education groups.

The ocean carbon sink strengthened in previous warm El Niño years due to reduced CO₂ outgassing in the tropics. Here the authors show that the ocean carbon sink declined in 2023 despite record-high sea surface temperatures (SSTs), primarily due to SST-driven outgassing of CO₂ in the subtropics.

How much methane will be emitted from the boreal-Arctic region under climate change is not well constrained. Here the authors show that accounting for distinct wetland and lake classes leads to lower estimates of current methane loss as some classes emit low amounts of methane.

The authors assess the impacts of tropical deforestation and its subsequent local warming on human heat-related mortality. They estimate that deforestation-related warming (+0.27 °C) is associated with approximately 28,000 heat-related deaths per year.

Ageing is linked to environmental factors. This study shows that although participants gradually adapted to heat over time, cumulative exposure to heatwaves had stable and adverse impacts on ageing, especially among manual workers, rural residents and those with limited air conditioning.

Climate surveys are common in the global north but remain limited in the global south. Through a large-scale survey in seven global south countries, this study examines public climate knowledge and identifies their most trusted information sources and preferred climate policies.

Climate beliefs do not exist in isolation but form an interconnected network known as a belief system. This study analyses the density and inconsistency of belief systems and their associations with informational and socioeconomic factors to inform effective climate change communication strategies.

Homeowners could benefit from flood insurance to offset the negative impacts of climate-induced natural disasters. However, with detailed micro-level data, researchers find substantial protection gaps and underinsurance across the USA that disproportionately affect low-income households.

The decarbonization of energy systems requires access to minerals that are critical for manufacturing low-carbon technologies. Here researchers show that meeting climate targets could be impeded by material shortages, revealing the importance of diverse solutions that balance mitigation, equity and resource constraints.

The authors jointly assess the changes in land and ocean net primary production from 2003 to 2021. They show contrasting trends, with overall planetary increases (0.11 ± 0.13 PgC yr⁻¹) driven by terrestrial enhancement and offset by oceanic decline.

Tropical cyclones can occur concurrently in the same basins in clusters, potentially resulting in greater damage. Here the authors show that global warming causes a shift in hotspots of such clusters towards the North Atlantic.

Solid waste disposal is a major source of anthropogenic methane, yet estimating these emissions is difficult. Here the authors use satellite data to assess emissions from high-emitting landfills and find that transforming open sites to sanitary landfills could offer a large mitigation potential.