Research articles

Literature produced inconsistent findings regarding the links between extreme weather events and climate policy support across regions, populations and events. This global study offers a holistic assessment of these relationships and highlights the role of subjective attribution.

Growing wildfire threats require governing institutions to adapt their responses for effective management, yet institutional adaptation remains unexplored. This study reveals increasingly complex task environments for institutions managing wildfire incidents in the USA over the period 1999–2020.

The authors generate ~1-km² growth curves for aboveground live carbon in regrowing forests, globally. They show that maximum carbon removal rates can vary by 200-fold spatially and with age, with the greatest rates estimated at about 30 ± 12 years, highlighting the role of secondary forests in carbon cycling.

Fair climate targets aligned with the Paris Agreement can be calculated in multiple ways, yielding diverse outcomes. Researchers unpack how equity, global strategies and political and social uncertainties shape fair share allocations, using them to assess nationally determined contributions and guide global climate finance.

Fire emissions can be an important source of nutrients such as iron, particularly for the oceans. Here the authors estimate that climate-change-driven changes in fire emissions could increase iron deposition in ocean ecosystems, enhancing productivity particularly in the North Atlantic.

Content delivery algorithms on social media exhibit biases in audience selection, which are understudied in the climate context. This study combines observational analysis and a field experiment to reveal algorithmic bias in Facebook’s climate ad data across ___location, gender and age groups.

Integrated assessment model-based scenarios are commonly used to project future emission pathways but suffer from submission biases and high computational cost. Here researchers develop a deep learning framework to generate synthetic scenarios and replicate key variables across a wide range of mitigation ambitions.

Decarbonizing the residential sector is essential for net-zero targets, and the EU has established ambitious policy packages with various instruments. This research shows that beyond carbon trading programmes, massive heat-pump subsidies and targeted energy renovation incentives are needed.

The authors consider the future climate resilience and genomic adaptive capacity of the globally important crop sorghum using 1,937 global accessions. They identify the best potential parents and geographies for crop improvements, and underscore the need for better accessibility of plant resources.

A gap remains in understanding flood-induced migration across sociodemographic groups. This study quantifies the flood-induced inflow/outflow selective migration by education, employment and age in the United States, and reveals how media sentiment and income effect aggravate selective migration.

The authors combine horizontal and vertical climate velocities to understand how marine species shift in response to climate change. They show that vertical velocity, which is often overlooked, better explains climate responses, with implications for species adaptation and fishing resources.

How mountain glaciers will react to temporarily overshooting 1.5 °C of warming is poorly understood. Here the authors show irreversible global glacier loss for centuries after overshoot, implying long-term reductions in glacial water resources with amplified impacts in regions where glaciers regrow.

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.

Using seven generations of selected zebrafish (Danio rerio), the authors consider the trade-offs and mechanisms behind evolution of warming tolerance. They show unexpected improvements in cooling tolerance in warming-adapted fish, and highlight mechanistic insights behind warming tolerance.

The gap between adaptation policy planning and actual implementation could delay effective actions. Researchers demonstrate why internal consistency checks should be the starting point to reduce the gap by applying them for city-level adaptation plans across Europe.

The authors assess the risk of overshoot beyond 1.5 °C warming, using three scenarios with minimal overshoot, brief overshoot and sustained overshoot. They show a risk of long-term Amazon dieback, which begins as early as 1.3 °C warming but is largely mitigated by reducing temperature below 1.5 °C.

While climate injustice is widely recognized, a quantification of how emissions inequality translates into unequal accountability is still lacking. Here researchers examine how affluent groups disproportionately contribute to the increase in mean temperature and the frequency of extreme events.

The urban heat island (UHI) effect can increase and decrease mortality depending on the season, yet global comparison is still lacking. This study finds that the UHI effect has net positive impact by reducing more cold-related mortality and highlights the necessity of place-based adaptive cooling strategies.