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While ocean processes have long dominated our understanding of climate variability, growing evidence reveals that changes in terrestrial water are an unseen force reshaping the Earth’s climate, with its decline potentially accelerating global warming and pushing us toward a dangerous tipping point.

Global leaf area has increased over the past four decades, raising hopes for its role in mitigating climate change through carbon uptake and cooling effects. This study shows that vegetation cover change, particularly tree cover gain in the Northern Hemisphere, plays a significant role in driving the greening trend.

Extreme wind speeds critical for wind turbine design have increased across 63% of global coasts. Over half of offshore wind farms in Asia and Europe are in areas with increasing extreme winds, urging adaptive infrastructure under climate change.

Using a global coupled biogeochemistry–climate model and a chemistry and transport model reveals that China’s present-day global radiative forcing is about ten per cent of the current global total, made up of both warming and cooling contributions; if in the future China reduces the cooling forcings, global warming could accelerate.

Oral drug delivery system has clinical potential for colorectal cancer (CRC) drug therapy but limited by the delivery efficiency when transporting through the formidable intestinal barriers. Here this group reports a Lactobacillus rhamnosus-engineered mesoporous silica nanosystem which effectively penetrates intestinal mucus and epithelial barrier, thereby delivering NO donor BNN6 and cisplatin for in vivo CRC tumor growth inhibition.

Prolonged low wind speeds can lead to a strong reduction in wind power generation. Here, the authors show that such wind drought events become more frequent and extended under global warming, threatening energy security in some regions.

Satellite records combined with global ecosystem models show a persistent and widespread greening over 25–50% of the global vegetated area; less than 4% of the globe is browning. CO₂ fertilization explains 70% of the observed greening trend.

Global in situ observations show greenhouse gas emissions from wetlands are lowest when the water table is near the surface, and therefore rewetting wetlands could substantially reduce future emissions.

More frequent rapid-onset droughts, “flash droughts”, threaten ecosystem stability in a warming climate. This study shows that northern hemisphere vegetation has been increasingly sensitive to flash droughts with faster declining rates since the early 2000s.

The ratio of plant transpiration to total terrestrial evapotranspiration (T/ET) captures the role of vegetation in surface–atmosphere interactions. An emergent constraint approach strongly increases existing model T/ET estimates with implications for river flows.

To explore how climate warming may affect rice yield, a study used field experiments and three modelling approaches to examine the sensitivity of rice yield to warming. The study predicts that severe rice yield losses are likely to occur without effective crop improvement.

Northern Hemisphere photosynthesis is thought to respond positively to temperature variations, yet the strength of this relationship may change over time. Here, using a combination of satellite data and models, the authors assess the temporal change of this relationship over the past three decades.

Reversed precipitation responses to Amazon deforestation show that deforestation leads to precipitation increases in the wet season and decreases in the dry season.

Wind speeds have reduced globally over land since the 1980s. In situ data show that this reversed around 2010, with natural ocean–atmosphere variability thought to drive the wind speed changes, as well as a 17% increase in potential wind energy for 2010–2017 and a boosted wind power capacity factor.

Changes in tree cover can change surface temperatures in multiple ways. Here, the authors show an asymmetric direct biophysical effect of tree cover change, as the cooling due to tree cover gain is greater in magnitude than the warming from tree cover loss in most forests.

Tropical aboveground biomass carbon is a crucial, yet complex, component of the terrestrial C budget. Here remote observations demonstrate that fire emissions and post-fire recovery in non-forested African biomes dominate the interannual variability of aboveground biomass carbon, which acts as a moderate net C sink.

Levees can obscure the public perception of flood risk, reflected in accelerated rates of development in floodplains relative to surrounding areas. Effective regulation and legislative measures can reverse this effect for more sustainable management.

Northern Hemisphere greening in early spring stimulated biomass production in forest ecosystems more strongly than in semi-arid grasslands during summer over the 1982–2015 period, according to an analysis based on explainable machine learning of satellite-based data and model simulations.

Using different high-resolution satellite datasets, this study analyses gross forest carbon loss associated with forest removal over the tropics during the twenty-first century focusing on regional fluxes and trends, as well as drivers of loss, both aspects rarely studied in previous work.

A machine learning model for generating crop-specific and spatially explicit NH₃ emission factors globally shows that global NH₃ emissions in 2018 were lower than previous estimates that did not fully consider fertilizer management practices.

The degree to which wheat yield in China will respond to future warming remains uncertain. These authors compile data from warming experiments and process-based statistical models and show that warming increases yield only in regions where growing season mean temperature is low and water supply is not limiting.

Recent warming has significantly advanced leaf onset in the northern hemisphere. Here, the authors show asymmetric effects of daytime and nighttime temperature change on the timing of leaf onset.

The iron and steel industry is emissions intensive. Here the authors explore its decarbonisation potential based on recovering energy and recycling materials from waste streams in 2020-2050. 28.5% of CO₂ emissions under sectoral 2 °C target requirements can be reduced in a high-potential pathway.

Boreal forests have been experiencing both gains and losses in recent decades. Here, the authors show that boreal forest resilience is more sensitive to forest cover losses than to gains, indicating that functional declines due to forest loss outpace improvements following forest recovery.

Deforestation causes elevation-dependent warming over tropical mountain regions, according to high-resolution climate simulations.

Cultivated areas have expanded at the expense of forests, including primary and protected forests, in Southeast Asian highlands, according to an analysis of satellite imagery of the region.

Earth system model projections of vegetation–climate feedback frequently depend on inaccurate values of evaporation sensitivity to vegetation changes, potentially resulting in misleading conclusions. A promising avenue involves improving the transpiration partitioning parameterizations and incorporating groundwater connections to refine the modelled sensitivity.

The development of hydropower offers a renewable energy source that can help reduce society’s dependence on fossil fuels. A global assessment of the unused profitable hydropower potential can be performed by incorporating strict constraints to identify hydropower station locations with reduced environmental and societal impacts.

China’s ‘Grain for Green’ revegetation programme has potential to help mitigate climate change. However, the increased water demand in the Loess Plateau is approaching a level that will impact on water availability to meet human demand.

Solutions that can support multiple sustainability goals related to clean energy, and resource use efficiency, will be crucial in the near future. The study estimates the potential of floating solar panels on reservoirs globally to generate renewable energy, reduce water losses and conserve land.

The world keeps urbanizing. This study finds that since 1985 global urban lands have expanded four times faster than previously recognized and faster than population is growing.

Water level resilience loss in the Pearl River Delta, primarily driven by human activities, is spatially heterogeneous and propagates across subsystems within the Delta, as revealed by using autocorrelation and a high-dimensional resilience transmission method.

In China, coal plant renovation and oil field carbon capture utilization and storage projects could increase local per capita income and decrease carbon dioxide emissions, according to an analysis that uses an index that integrates geological, energy, and economic development data.

Southeast Asia contains half the world’s tropical mountain forests. This study finds increasing mountain forest loss there, with the clearing frontier moving higher in the 2010s and causing unprecedented carbon loss.

Spring leaf unfolding has been occurring earlier in the year because of rising temperatures; however, long-term evidence in the field from 7 European tree species studied in 1,245 sites shows that this early unfolding effect is being reduced in recent years, possibly because the reducing chilling and/or insolation render trees less responsive to warming.

Greening—increasing leaf area index—affects regional climate in a number of contradictory ways. The net global effect is now revealed to be cooling that has offset the equivalent of 12% of global land-surface warming over the past 30 years.

Climate change is exacerbating geohazards in High Mountain Asia that pose a growing risk to hydropower and water infrastructure across the region.

The land surface albedo reduction due to solar panel installation varies across land-cover types and climate regimes, but in most locations the decrease does not outweigh the benefits of decarbonization, according to an analysis using satellite images of 352 sites.