News & Views in 2026

Multinational investment is vital for African growth, yet it drives higher rates of forest loss than local industry. Researchers now suggest that home-country laws should hold global firms accountable for their environmental footprint abroad.

Microplastics and nanoplastics are moving in the atmosphere worldwide. Now, research shows that they can interact with sunlight and influence the climate system.

Addressing non-CO₂ greenhouse gases alongside CO₂ is essential for climate mitigation, but distributional effects remain a major concern. Now a study shows that when climate policy extends beyond CO₂, the resulting costs are unevenly distributed across households worldwide.

Droughts and tropical cyclones are two well-known hazards that can interact in dynamic ways. Now, research shows that rainfall from tropical cyclones shortens and weakens droughts in coastal regions but not in a uniform way.

Food security remains a major global challenge, which is only amplified by ongoing climate change. Here, I look back on a 2015 paper on climate change impacts on wheat and discuss subsequent research on agriculture and food security.

The North Atlantic is exceptional in cooling during the twentieth century while the world warmed. Here we look back on an influential 2015 study that linked this cooling to a weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and consider the wider implications that this may have for climate, ecosystems and society.

Carbon pricing can be a cost-effective way to cut carbon dioxide emissions, but only if it is politically sustainable. Two recent papers document how carbon pricing can create winners and losers, while also showing how these shortcomings can be addressed by careful policy design.

Warming oceans will alter not only how much phytoplankton grow, but what they are made of and how they function within marine food webs. Now a mechanistic model shows how environmental change reshapes cellular composition, offering a path towards more physiologically grounded marine ecosystem projections.

The massive carbon store in soils is vulnerable to anthropogenic warming. Now, a study shows that climate-driven changes in precipitation can mediate soil carbon responses to warming, with drought amplifying soil carbon losses.

Climate change will expose new ice-free areas of Antarctica. Now a study explores how climate change might spur the first ‘gold rush’ on the unexploited continent.

Melting beneath floating Antarctic ice shelves is a major driver of ice-shelf mass loss and is projected to increase over the coming century. High-resolution maps of Antarctic basal-melt rates reveal stronger melt within narrow basal channels than previously recognized, making some ice shelves more vulnerable to additional melt channelization.

Policy and planning increasingly depend on large ensembles of climate and energy scenarios, but these collections can be biased and hard to interpret. A new weighting framework aims to make these ensembles more transparent, balanced and decision relevant.

Planning for climate action in food systems requires disaggregated spatial information on greenhouse gas emissions and removals. Now, a study on the major emission sources for global croplands yields such emissions estimates, identifies the locations of hotspots and assesses mitigation trade-offs with food productivity.

Early life stages are particularly critical for human brain development. A large-scale study in China shows that heat exposure in early life is associated with increased risks of delayed neurodevelopment in preschool children.

It is essential to understand the best way to frame a persuasive message aimed at increasing concern about climate change and support for pro-environmental action. Now a Registered Report presents a large-scale study that tests and compares the effectiveness of ten widely cited messaging strategies.