Television is a widely used medium for climate information worldwide, yet its role in public engagement remains underexplored. Here we examine both the representation of climate change on television and the audience engagement with it. We analysed 23,478 hours of programming across 20 German television channels over 61 days in 2022 and further assessed audience engagement with...
Integrated assessment models produce large ensembles of socioeconomic scenarios that are used profusely in climate change research. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), non-governmental organizations or national climate committees often rely on ensemble statistics to identify mitigation strategies and set climate targets. A limitation of such evidence is the...
As climate activism has expanded, governments have increasingly repressed disruptive but non-violent protests. Yet evidence remains mixed regarding whether repression inhibits or galvanizes activism. In this study, we examine how anticipated and experienced repression predict intentions to engage in normative (rule-conforming) and non-normative (rule-violating) collective climate...
The Antarctic Ice Sheet is subject to amplifying feedbacks which can accelerate ice loss and lead to effectively irreversible retreat. We here analyse the distinct nature and risk of long-term ice loss for each individual drainage basin under different levels of warming. Depending on topographic and climatic conditions, we find that ice loss in some basins unfolds gradually with...
Spatially explicit cropland greenhouse gas emission data are essential for identifying emission hotspots and guiding sustainable mitigation strategies. Here we develop high-resolution (5 arcmin) global maps of cropland emissions across 46 crop classes in 2020 by integrating sectoral datasets on synthetic fertilizer, manure, crop residue, in-field burning, rice cultivation and...
The wastewater sector is now increasingly targeting fugitive CH4 and N2O emissions. National inventory reports (NIRs) are central to tracking these non-CO2 emissions, yet the extent to which NIRs capture sector-wide wastewater emissions remain unclear due to inconsistent accounting methodologies, complex systems and large fluctuations across regions and time. Here we conduct a...
Pathways consistent with global climate objectives typically deploy billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) from land-intensive methods such as forestation and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. Such large-scale deployment of land-intensive CDR may have negative consequences for biodiversity. Here we assess scenarios across five integrated assessment models and...
European coastal regions host a dense transport network that supports various human activities and well-being. However, global warming is expected to increase coastal flooding risk, whose impact on existing and planned European transport systems remains unknown. Here we present the fully probabilistic assessment of coastal flood risk to Europe’s surface transport infrastructure...
The El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a major driver of global climate variability, yet its long-term effect on life expectancy remains unclear. Here we quantify how ENSO persistently impedes mortality improvement, leading to considerable life expectancy and economic losses across high-income Pacific Rim countries. We estimate life expectancy losses of 0.5 years (monetary...
Climate change impinges on the Arctic Ocean, leading to sea-ice loss and potentially drastic cascading ecosystem changes. A recent process is atlantification, the growing influence of warm and salty waters from the Atlantic on the Arctic with increasing ocean volume transport from the Nordic Seas to the Barents Sea playing a key role. Despite its importance and a multitude of...
Higher temperatures are expected to impact globally on poverty and inequality, yet little cross-country analysis exists to quantify the effects. Here we analyse a panel dataset of subnational poverty in 130 countries covering the past decade and find that a 1 °C increase in temperature causes headcount poverty increases of 0.63–1.18 percentage points, using the daily poverty...
Projections of glacier change typically focus on mass and area loss, yet the disappearance of individual glaciers directly threatens culturally, spiritually and touristically significant landscapes. Here, using three global glacier models, we project a sharp rise in the number of glaciers disappearing worldwide, peaking between 2041 and 2055 with up to ~4,000 glaciers vanishing...
Unlike CO2, methane emissions have a particularly large short-term effect on temperature. We argue that these largely temporary temperature effects of methane emissions are apt to be offset by temporary CO2 removal. Temporally matching offsetting temperature reductions to the temperature impulse of methane eliminates the sizable intertemporal welfare transfers that occur when...
Climate velocity—the speed and direction species must move to track climate change—is often estimated without accounting for vegetation-driven microclimatic variation. Using mechanistic microclimate models parameterized with three-dimensional maps of topography and vegetation structure, here we show that microclimate heterogeneity reduces the magnitude and alters the direction of...
Multiple climate-related stressors affect the ocean, including warming, acidification, deoxygenation and variations in salinity, with profound effects on Earth system cycles, marine ecosystems and human well-being. Nevertheless, a global perspective on the combined impacts of these changes on both surface and subsurface ocean conditions remains unclear. Here, applying a time-of...
Global warming is increasing the number and intensity of many extreme weather and climate events. Here we argue that extreme day-to-day temperature changes, exceeding the 90th percentile threshold of historical records, are an independent, but largely ignored, aspect of extreme weather events. Such extreme temperature changes have a stronger impact on human health in many...
The potential death toll of exceptional extreme heat events is crucial for climate risk analysis and adaptation planning but may not be captured by existing projections. Here we combine machine learning-based projections of five historical European heat waves under present or future global temperatures with empirical exposure–response functions to quantify the potential for...
Artificial light pollution is increasing worldwide with pervasive effects on ecosystem structure and function, yet its influence on ecosystem metabolism remains largely unknown. Here we combine artificial light at night (ALAN) intensity metrics with eddy covariance observations across 86 sites in North America and Europe to show that ALAN indirectly decreases annual net ecosystem...