Nature Climate Change

Nature Climate Change is a monthly journal dedicated to publishing the most significant and cutting-edge research on the nature, underlying causes or impacts of global climate change and its implications for the economy, policy and the world at large. All editorial decisions are made by a team of full-time professional editors.

List of Papers (Total 864)

Multi-decadal climate services help farmers assess and manage future risks

Climate services can support on-farm decisions, yet this potential is currently not fully realized. Here, using a participatory qualitative risk analysis framework, we introduced 24 Australian farmers to My Climate View, an Australian online, multi-decadal climate service, and asked them to identify, assess and discuss management of long-term risks in light of its projections. We...

Novel temperatures are already widespread beneath the world’s tropical forest canopies

Tropical forest biodiversity is potentially at high risk from climate change, but most species reside within or below the canopy, where they are buffered from extreme temperatures. Here, by modelling the hourly below-canopy climate conditions of 300,000 tropical forest locations globally between 1990 and 2019, we show that recent small increases in below-canopy temperature (<1 °C...

Accounting for Pacific climate variability increases projected global warming

Observational constraint methods based on the relationship between the past global warming trend and projected warming across climate models were used to reduce uncertainties in projected warming by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Internal climate variability in the eastern tropical Pacific associated with the so-called pattern effect weakens this relationship and...

Reducing sectoral hard-to-abate emissions to limit reliance on carbon dioxide removal

To reach net-zero greenhouse gas targets, carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies are required to compensate for residual emissions in the hard-to-abate sectors. However, dependencies on CDR technologies involve environmental, technical and social risks, particularly related to increased land requirements for afforestation and bioenergy crops. Here, using scenarios consistent...

A decrease in radiative forcing and equivalent effective chlorine from hydrochlorofluorocarbons

The Montreal Protocol and its successive amendments have been successful in curbing emissions of ozone-depleting substances and potent greenhouse gases via production/consumption controls. Here we show that the radiative forcing and equivalent effective chlorine from hydrochlorofluorocarbons has decreased from 61.75 mW m−2 and 321.69 ppt, respectively, since 2021, 5 years before...

Extreme weather events do not increase political parties

Exposure to extreme weather events can make people more aware of environmental changes; however, it remains unclear how such events influence politicians’ behaviour. Combining supervised learning algorithms on over 260,000 press releases by European parties with a difference-in-differences design, we find that apart from Green parties, extreme weather events do not increase...

Globally representative evidence on the actual and perceived support for climate action

Mitigating climate change necessitates global cooperation, yet global data on individuals’ willingness to act remain scarce. In this study, we conducted a representative survey across 125 countries, interviewing nearly 130,000 individuals. Our findings reveal widespread support for climate action. Notably, 69% of the global population expresses a willingness to contribute 1% of...

Boreal–Arctic wetland methane emissions modulated by warming and vegetation activity

Wetland methane (CH4) emissions over the Boreal–Arctic region are vulnerable to climate change and linked to climate feedbacks, yet understanding of their long-term dynamics remains uncertain. Here, we upscaled and analysed two decades (2002–2021) of Boreal–Arctic wetland CH4 emissions, representing an unprecedented compilation of eddy covariance and chamber observations. We...

Over-reliance on water infrastructure can hinder climate resilience in pastoral drylands

Extreme droughts are affecting millions of livestock farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, causing water shortages, famines, migration and fatalities. The construction of new small water infrastructures (SWIs), such as deep wells and boreholes, is increasingly supported by climate resilience programmes of non-governmental organizations and national governments to improve water...

Offshoring emissions through used vehicle exports

Policies to reduce transport emissions often overlook the international flow of used vehicles. We quantify the rate at which used vehicles generated CO2 and pollution for all used vehicles exported from Great Britain—a globally leading used vehicle exporter—across 2005–2021. Destined for low–middle-income countries, exported vehicles fail roadworthiness standards and, even under...

Flexible foraging behaviour increases predator vulnerability to climate change

Higher temperatures are expected to reduce species coexistence by increasing energetic demands. However, flexible foraging behaviour could balance this effect by allowing predators to target specific prey species to maximize their energy intake, according to principles of optimal foraging theory. Here we test these assumptions using a large dataset comprising 2,487 stomach...

Climate threats to coastal infrastructure and sustainable development outcomes

Climate hazards pose increasing threats to development outcomes across the world’s coastal regions by impacting infrastructure service delivery. Using a high-resolution dataset of 8.2 million households in Bangladesh’s coastal zone, we assess the extent to which infrastructure service disruptions induced by flood, cyclone and erosion hazards can thwart progress towards the...

Eddy activity in the Arctic Ocean projected to surge in a warming world

Ocean eddies play a critical role in climate and marine life. In the rapidly warming Arctic, little is known about how ocean eddy activity will change because existing climate models cannot resolve Arctic Ocean mesoscale eddies. Here, by employing a next-generation global sea ice–ocean model with kilometre-scale horizontal resolution in the Arctic, we find a surge of eddy kinetic...

Towards an increasingly biased view on Arctic change

The Russian invasion of Ukraine hampers the ability to adequately describe conditions across the Arctic, thus biasing the view on Arctic change. Here we benchmark the pan-Arctic representativeness of the largest high-latitude research station network, INTERACT, with or without Russian stations. Excluding Russian stations lowers representativeness markedly, with some biases being...