Search

The authors discuss the challenges of curbing land take and the complexity of achieving the net-zero limit. They call for a shift in perspective beyond the restrictive logic of traditional land-use planning and suggest that the regenerative potential of cities be unleashed.

Benchmarking greenhouse gas emissions from wastewater treatment plants is an essential step in developing mitigation strategies. This is now achieved for the USA by modelling over 15,000 facilities using Monte Carlo simulations to obtain a national baseline.

Bacteria and fungi provide plants with enhanced access to mineral nutrients and water, but have also served as a source of genes to succeed on land. This study shows multiple independent transfers of a key gene for metal ion transport (NAS) to various plant lineages, highlighting a complex and dynamic history of gene exchange.

Analysis of data on 971 bird species in natural habitat and cattle pasture in Colombia finds that near-national-scale losses of bird diversity greatly exceed losses recorded at the local scale, suggesting that extrapolations from local studies will severely underestimate biodiversity losses.

The paper analyzes the impact of omitting biophysical effects from carbon credits on climate mitigation. It shows that some Voluntary Carbon Market projects may result in net warming due to albedo while others enhance cooling.

Ohenhen et al. used space geodetic measurements to rigorously quantify land subsidence in the 28 most populous US cities. They find that over 20% of the area in each city is sinking, affecting approximately 34 million people and placing more than 29,000 buildings at high risk of damage.

Pl@ntBERT is a language-based AI model that learned the ‘syntax’ of plant assemblages, predicting likely species and inferring habitats by modelling biotic relationships.

Human-induced pressure may alter the size structure of animal communities. Here, the authors investigate the impact of land use, non-native species and climatic variables on the body size structure of fish communities and fishery-associated ecosystem services in the Upper Paraná Floodplain.

Global land cover conversions increased carbon uptake during 1982 to 2019, with newly established forests in the Northern Hemisphere driving gains that counterbalanced emissions from tropical deforestation.

Over 20 species of geographically and phylogenetically diverse bird species produce convergent whining vocalizations towards their respective brood parasites. Model presentation and playback experiments across multiple continents suggest that these learned calls provoke an innate response even among allopatric species.

Using a global database of the radiocarbon content of rivers combining new and published measurements, isotopic mass balance suggests that about 60% of river CO₂ emissions are derived from millennial or older carbon sources.

Centennial-scale variations in methane carbon isotope ratios are attributed to changes in pyrogenic and biogenic sources that can be correlated with anthropogenic activities, such as varying levels of biomass burning during the period of the Roman empire and the Han dynasty, and changes in natural climate variability.

Analysis combining multiple global tree databases reveals that whether a location is invaded by non-native tree species depends on anthropogenic factors, but the severity of the invasion depends on the native species diversity.

Treatment-seeking for fever is widely used to estimate treatment of childhood infections, but cross-country comparisons are problematic. Here, the authors estimate the probability of seeking treatment for fever at public facilities across 29 countries by quantifying person-level latent variables.

Short-lived halogens have a substantial indirect cooling effect on climate and this cooling effect has increased since pre-industrial times owing to anthropogenic amplification of natural halogen emissions.

Aerosol deposition onto the surface of the ocean has been underestimated, suggesting that aerosol lifetimes over the ocean are longer than previously appreciated, according to a global compilation of cosmogenic beryllium isotope data.

Human ignitions and lightning strikes both influence global fire regimes. Here the authors disaggregate the two effects in an analysis of global daily fuel moisture and flammability threshold datasets, and show that anthropogenic influences have lengthened fire seasons globally, regardless of other factors.

Achieving mitigation from forests aligned with #NDCs requires $20–72 billion annually by 2030. Global coordination could double mitigation with the same level of finance, revealing major efficiency gains and informing next generation climate targets.

The soils of urban greenspaces are strikingly rich. This study finds that the variety of microbial life there is linked to acidic conditions and that this diversity is more homogenous than found in farmland soils.

Urbanization disrupts oak tree microbiomes by reducing beneficial fungi and increasing plant and human pathogens across leaves, roots and soils, with consequences for tree health, urban climate mitigation and potential human exposure to pathogens.

Highly protected areas help drylands stay productive under increasing aridity, delaying critical ecosystem thresholds and underscoring the need to expand protection to safeguard these vulnerable regions from climate change.

Data on beetle, bird, plant and mammal occupancy of woodland sites in UK agricultural landscapes demonstrate how contemporary spatial spillovers and legacies of past land use interact to affect species richness and community composition.

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.

“Dissolved oxygen (DO) sustains river ecosystems, but the effects of hydrological extremes remain poorly understood. Here it is shown that sudden floods cause abrupt declines in DO, suggesting that increased future flooding may lead to the degradation of aquatic ecosystems.

Across 97% of forest area from eight million sampled forested locations worldwide, the density of aboveground biomass is lower near forest edges than in forest interiors. Given widespread forest fragmentation, this edge effect is estimated to be responsible for 9% reduction in forest aboveground biomass.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is predicted to slow with climate change. Sea surface temperature data and climate model analysis show that since 1900 natural variability has been dominant in AMOC changes; anthropogenic forcing is not yet reliably detectable by this method.

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) since the Last Interglacial is reconstructed, showing orbital-scale shifts in ACC position driven by eccentricity and precession, possibly counteracting the predicted southward shift due to global warming.

A decade of BGC-Argo and plankton records shows North Pacific heatwaves reshape food webs and trap small particles in midwater, slowing deep-ocean carbon export. Impacts vary by event, underscoring the need for sustained ocean monitoring.

Earth system model simulations illustrate that agricultural nitrogen fertilization significantly enhances the amplitude of land-atmosphere CO₂ exchange, with a magnitude comparable to that of CO₂ fertilization.

A new network approach maps every street block in sub-Saharan Africa using high-resolution building and street data, pinpointing infrastructure needs and revealing development gradients from neighbourhoods to cities and rural areas.

Climate change and land use change may have independent or interactive effects on species’ distributions. Here, the authors show that changes in bird, lepidopteran and plant ranges across Great Britain are often explained by individual or additive effects of land conversion and temperature change.

Small-scale farmers in Southeast Asia are increasingly turning to monocultures of oil palm and rubber to maximize income. Clough and colleagues demonstrate that this land-use change in Indonesia comes at a cost to a wide array of ecosystem functions and biodiversity.

Epidemiological methods are used to show that the Great Fear of 1789, a series of peasant insurrections in rural revolutionary France, was driven by deliberate political action rather than spontaneous fear.

Reforestation is a key climate change mitigation strategy, but global maps of its potential are widely criticized. This study shows that addressing those critiques substantially refines estimates of the places with reforestation potential.

Declining Arctic sea ice is increasing polar bear land use. Here, the authors follow 20 different polar bears on land over 3 years and measure daily energy expenditure finding that despite behavioural and diet plasticity the bears are at risk of starvation.

Impacts from a climate event can cascade through natural, anthropogenic and socio-economic systems. Here the authors assess cascading climate impacts on the EU and identify intervention points for adaptation related to water, livelihoods, agriculture, infrastructure and economy, and violent conflict.

Climate mitigation through natural climate solutions in crop-lands may be a way to reconcile climate goals with food security. However, here the authors show that some natural climate solution practices tend to lower yields and that maintaining yields lowers the potential GHG mitigation.

Ecosystem services provided by coral reefs to coastal communities can depend on upstream land-use change activities such as forest restoration. This study assessed the social and ecological benefits provided by different watershed interventions designed at regional and national scales in Mesoamerica.

In this study, authors show that the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) drives 63% of dengue case variation via rising local temperatures. They estimate future cases may increase by 39–82% due to increasing ENSO events under human-induced warming.

There are continuing questions on how much investments in land-based mitigation activities could deliver in terms of abatement. This study shows that annual investments of $2.4billion in the U.S. land could deliver abatement of around 80 MtCO2e/yr.

Long-term peak streamflow trends in the USA are primarily driven by direct human interventions – especially urbanization and water management – rather than climate alone, according to an analysis of over 3,900 stream gauges.