The severity of wildfire burns in interior lands of western US ecosystems has been increasing. However, less is known about its coastal mountain ecosystems, especially under extreme weather conditions, raising concerns about the vulnerability of these populated areas to catastrophic fires. Here we examine the fine-scale association between burn severity and a suite of environmental drivers including

Sudden stratospheric warmings (SSWs) are amongst the most dramatic events in the Earth’s atmosphere and they drive extreme surface weather conditions. They have been recently linked to the hot and dry weather conditions that favour wildfires over Australia. However, the chance of a southern hemisphere event is unknown because it has only been observed once. Legitimate estimation of the frequency of

Increasing concentrations of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) have been identified in many freshwater systems over the last three decades. Studies have generally nominated atmospheric deposition as the key driver of this trend, with changes in climatic factors also contributing. However, there is still much uncertainty concerning net effects of these drivers on DOC concentrations and export dynamics

Urgent and ambitious climate action is required to avoid catastrophic climate change and consequent health impacts. Political will is a critical component of the ambitious climate action equation. The current level of political will observed for many national governments is considered inadequate, with numerous political leaders yet to commit to climate action commensurate with the projected risks and

Steam-electric power dominates global electricity production. Mitigating its environmental burdens relies on quantifying them globally, on a high resolution. Here, with an unprecedented combination of detail and coverage, the Rankine cycle was individually modelled for >21 000 geocoded steam-electric generating units globally. Accounting for different cooling systems and fuels enabled the calculation

High Mountain Asia (HMA), which includes the Tibetan Plateau, Tienshan Mountains and surrounding region, has abundant snowfall and a long period of snow cover annually. The headwaters of many prominent Asian rivers depend in part on HMA meltwater. In this study, we evaluate projected changes in mean snowfall (Smean), snowfall days (Sd), and snowfall fraction (Sf) for the years 2070–2099 relative to

We estimated the CO 2 emissions produced by more than 40 000 international flights associated with Japan’s two major airlines (Japan Airlines and All Nippon Airways), and identified the drivers for these CO 2 emissions using an index decomposition analysis conducted between 2005 and 2015. The results showed that introducing the more fuel-efficient Boeing 787 led to CO 2 emission reductions of 1.3 million

Multi-hazard assessment is needed to understand compound risk. Yet, modelling of multiple climate hazards has been limitedly applied at the global scale to date. Here we provide a first comprehensive assessment of global population exposure to hydro-meteorological extremes—floods, drought and heatwaves—under different temperature increase targets. This study shows how limiting temperature increase

Forest degradation is widespread around the world, due to multiple factors such as unsustainable logging, agriculture, invasive species, fire, fuelwood gathering, and livestock grazing. In the Brazilian Amazon forest degradation from August 2006 to July 2016 reached 1,1 869 800 ha. The processes of forest degradation are still poorly understood, being a missing component in anthropogenic CO 2 emission

There is an active debate regarding the influence that climate has on the risk of armed conflict, which stems from challenges in assembling unbiased datasets, competing hypotheses on the mechanisms of climate influence, and the difficulty of disentangling direct and indirect climate effects. We use gridded historical non-state conflict records, satellite data, and land surface models in a structural

Climate models predict a strengthening contrast between wet and dry regions in the tropics and subtropics (30 °S–30 °N), and data from the latest model intercomparison project (CMIP6) support this expectation. Rainfall in ascending regions increases, and in descending regions decreases in climate models, reanalyses, and observational data. This strengthening contrast can be captured by tracking the

As environmental change in the Arctic accelerates, there is a growing need to accurately quantify the response of Arctic ecosystems throughout the year. To assess the temporal coverage of observations of carbon and nutrient fluxes, we used literature synthesis, quantitative meta-analysis, and exploration of a novel biogeochemical dataset from one of the best-documented Arctic ecosystems: the headwaters

The continued growth of Southwestern cities depends on reliable water export from Rocky Mountain headwaters, which provide ∼85% of Colorado River Basin (CRB) streamflow. Despite being more sensitive to warming temperatures, alpine systems are simplified in the regional-scale models currently in use to plan for future water supply. We used an integrated hydrologic model that couples groundwater and

The city of Berlin has significantly expanded public charging infrastructure for electric vehicles. As a result of this investment, real-world charging data for the city of Berlin are available for the first time. In addition to other metrics, this dataset contains specific information about carsharing vehicles. This research letter offers numerous insights into public charging demand and infrastructure

The 2001 Forest Service Roadless Rule prohibits roadbuilding in forests across an area equivalent to the combined states of New York and Maine (236 000 km 2 ). There have been recent assertions that roads are needed to prevent fire and to keep forests healthy. Despite twenty years of ongoing forest health monitoring and the unique scope and ecological significance of this network of roadless areas

Topographically delineated catchments are the common spatial unit to connect human activities and climate change with their consequences for water availability as a prerequisite for sustainable water management. However, inter-catchment groundwater flow and limited connectivity within the catchment results in effective catchment areas different from those suggested by surface topography. Here, we introduce

European climate is heavily influenced by the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). However, the spatial structure of the NAO is varying with time, affecting its regional importance. By analyzing an 850-year global climate model simulation of the last millennium it is shown that the variations in the spatial structure of the NAO can be linked to the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). The AMO changes

Peatlands typically act as carbon sinks, however, increasing wildfire severity and annual area burned may challenge this carbon sink status. Whilst most peat resistance to wildfire and drought research is based on deep peatlands that rarely lose their water table below the peat profile, shallow peatlands and peat deposits may be most vulnerable to high peat burn severity and extensive carbon loss.

We adopt an approach known as bright spots analysis to identify U.S. regions with surprisingly high corn yields given regional expectations, seasonal weather, and soil characteristics. These counties are regional ‘surprises’ that, by definition, achieve unexpectedly high levels of agricultural productivity. We then use multinomial logistic regression to identify the actionable factors—or the factors

Coastal forests sequester and store more carbon than their terrestrial counterparts but are at greater risk of conversion due to sea level rise. Saltwater intrusion from sea level rise converts freshwater-dependent coastal forests to more salt-tolerant marshes, leaving ‘ghost forests’ of standing dead trees behind. Although recent research has investigated the drivers and rates of coastal forest decline

The number of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) in the Czech Republic is increasing. Wastewater, which was previously disposed of in other ways (e.g. septic tanks, cesspits etc), is now entering the surface water (after treatment at a WWTP). Billions of Czech crowns have been invested in the construction of new WWTPs or reconstruction and intensification of existing ones. This money had been invested

Forest degradation affects forest structure, composition and diversity, carbon stocks, functionality and ecosystem processes. It is known to contribute significantly to global carbon emissions, but there is uncertainty about the relative size of these emissions. This is largely because while deforestation, or long-term forest clearance, has been successfully monitored using remote sensing (RS) technology

Brazil is the world’s leading coffee exporter, contributing billions of dollars to the global food economy. Yet, a majority of Brazilian coffee farms are operated by ‘smallholders’, producers with relatively small properties and primarily reliant on family labor. While previous work indicates that climate change will decrease the area suitable for coffee production in Brazil, no study has assessed

The remote and cold Antarctic continent presents unique challenges to quantify precipitation rates from space and in situ observations. This has resulted in large uncertainties in current estimates. In this study, we quantify annual precipitation rates over seven Antarctic basins using a novel mass budget (MB) approach, by building on the recent Landsat based estimate of ice discharge and changes in

Incomplete representations of physical processes often lead to structural errors in process-based (PB) hydrologic models. Machine learning (ML) algorithms can reduce streamflow modeling errors but do not enforce physical consistency. As a result, ML algorithms may be unreliable if used to provide future hydroclimate projections where climates and land use patterns are outside the range of training

The rise and decline of many complex, pre-European maize-farming cultures in the American Southwest coincides with the warm, climatically quiescent Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA, ca. 850–1350 CE) and transition to the cool, hydrologically variable Little Ice Age (LIA, ca. 1350–1850 CE). The effects of drought on early subsistence agriculture in the Southwest is well studied, but the impact of temperature

Tea-planted soils generally receiving high nitrogen (N) fertilizer doses are more vulnerable to acidification, and turn into significant sources of the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N 2 O). However, little is known about the magnitude of soil N 2 O emissions from global tea plantations. Based on a global meta-analysis of field experimental data collected from major tea growing countries, we

Agricultural production exploits about 70% of all water withdrawals around the globe, but to date, it is not clear if and how this water consumption is taken into consideration in the price of the agricultural primary goods. To shed light on this point, we analyze the farm gate prices of twelve representative crops in the period 1991-2016, considering data from 162 countries in total. The crop price

Long-term historic climate datasets are valuable tools to investigate climate variability, validate climate models and contextualize anticipated climate change. Surface solar radiation is one particularly relevant variable, with implications on policy decisions (e.g. performance of solar panels) and fundamental questions in climate science (e.g. regarding the energy budget). While all current twentieth

Urban transport provides access to multiple services, structures and impedes daily life of residents, and translates into wellbeing considerations, sustainability impacts, and GHG emissions. Thus motivated, multiple disciplines, ranging from psychology to urban planning, are invested in understanding the potential for transitioning to low-carbon and sustainable urban transport systems. While each discipline

The choice of the baseline period, intentionally chosen or not, as a reference for assessing future changes of any projected variable can play an important role for the resulting statement. In regional climate impact studies, well-established or arbitrarily chosen baselines are often used without being questioned. Here we investigated the effects of different baseline periods on the interpretation

Precipitation over the west Tibetan Plateau (TP) was always being accused of lacking observations that limits the precipitation moisture attribution and quantitation over the whole TP. By introducing precipitation from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) and other observation-based data, moisture sources for the whole TP and their variations from 1998 to 2018 are explored using an Eulerian

The intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) accounts for more than 30% of the global precipitation and its variability has a great effect on the people living in the tropical area. It is the manifestation of the Hadley circulation, tropical dynamic and thermodynamic coupling and the air-sea interaction. Therefore, it is essential to understand the changes and variability of the ITCZ, including its position

The input of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) into rivers has been reduced in recent decades in many regions of the world to mitigate adverse eutrophication effects. However, legislation focused first on the reduction of nutrient loads from point sources and only later on diffuse sources. These reduction strategies have implications on riverine N:P stoichiometry, which potentially alter patterns of

A major challenge for forest landscape restoration initiatives is the lack of quantitative evidence on how social factors drive environmental outcomes. Here we conduct an interdisciplinary quantitative analysis of the environmental and social drivers of tree biomass accumulation across 639 smallholder farms restoring native tree species in Mexico, Uganda and Mozambique. We use environmental and social

Large-scale crop yield failures are increasingly associated with food price spikes and food insecurity and are a large source of income risk for farmers. While the evidence linking extreme weather to yield failures is clear, consensus on the broader set of weather drivers and conditions responsible for recent yield failures is lacking. We investigate this for the case of four major crops in Germany

Understanding the impacts of land use cover changes (LUCC) on the environment is one of the most important scientific challenges in global change research. LUCC is one of the critical drivers of environmental change in South/Southeast Asia. Several studies suggest that LUCC in these countries is driven by population growth and economic development. In the region, LUCC is manifested in a variety of

Wildfire danger is often ascribed to increased temperature, decreased humidity, drier fuels, or higher wind speed. However, the concurrence of drivers—defined as climate, meteorological and biophysical factors that enable fire growth—is rarely tested for commonly used fire danger indices or climate change studies. Treating causal factors as independent additive influences can lead to inaccurate inferences

Grassland ecosystems play an essential role in climate regulation through carbon (C) storage in plant and soil. But, anthropogenic practices such as livestock grazing, grazing related excreta nitrogen (N) deposition, and manure/fertilizer N application have the potential to reduce the effectiveness of grassland C sink through increased nitrous oxide (N 2 O) and methane (CH 4 ) emissions. Although the

In terrestrial and marine ecosystems, remote sensing has been used to estimate gross primary productivity (GPP) for decades, but few applications exist for shallow freshwater ecosystems.Here we show field-based GPP correlates with satellite and airborne lake color across a range of optically and limnologically diverse lakes in interior Alaska. A strong relationship between in situ GPP derived from

Satellite-based estimates of ground-level nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 ) concentrations are useful for understanding links between air quality and health. A longstanding question has been why prior satellite-derived surface NO 2 concentrations are biased low with respect to ground-based measurements. In this work we demonstrate that these biases are due to both the coarse resolution of previous satellite

Current global riverine flood risk studies assume a constant mean sea level boundary. In reality high sea levels can propagate up a river, impede high river discharge, thus leading to elevated water levels. Riverine flood risk in deltas may therefore be underestimated. This paper presents the first global scale assessment of the joint influence of riverine and coastal drivers of flooding in deltas

Over the coming century, both Arctic and Antarctic sea ice cover are projected to substantially decline. While many studies have documented the potential impacts of projected Arctic sea ice loss on the climate of the mid-latitudes and the tropics, little attention has been paid to the impacts of Antarctic sea ice loss. Here, using comprehensive climate model simulations, we show that the effects of

Variations in solar shortwave and thermal longwave radiation over the Tibetan Plateau (TP) are crucial for global climate and regional ecological environment. Previous radiation studies over the TP were widely based on ground and satellite measurements of the radiation budget at the surface and at the top of the atmosphere. A stratospheric balloon-based radiation measurement system was employed in

The question of what cities can contribute to mitigation and adapting to climate change is gaining traction among researchers and policy makers alike. However, while the field is rich with case studies, methods that provide rich data across municipalities and potentially at global scale remain underdeveloped, and comparative insights remain scarce. Here we summarize contributions to the focus issue

Human-induced soil erosion is a serious threat to global sustainability, endangering global food security, driving desertification and biodiversity loss, and degrading other vital ecosystem services. To help assess this threat, we amassed a global inventory of soil erosion rates consisting of 10 030 plot years of data from 255 sites under conventional agriculture and soil conservation management. We

The transportation sector is at the beginning of a transition represented by electrification, shared mobility, and automation, which could lead to either increases or decreases in total travel and energy use. Understanding the factors enabling deep decarbonization of the passenger vehicle sector is essential for planning the required infrastructure investments and technology adoption policies. We examine

Increased aridity and drought risks are significant global concerns. However, there are few comprehensive studies on the related risks with regard to the differences between relatively weak levels of warming, including the recent targets of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) of 1.5 °C or 2 °C. The present study investigates the impacts of 1.5 °C and 2 °C warming on aridification

While previous research often finds flood impacts outside of conventional flood risk zones such as FEMA’s 100-year floodplain maps, we have less of a sense of the social and demographic composition of the areas outside of floodplains that experience these impacts, even though social inequalities in flood risk and impacts more broadly is well-documented in the United States. Using data on 100-year floodplains

Fire is an integral part of Earth’s system that links regional and global biogeochemical cycles, human activities, and ecosystems. Global estimates for biomass burning indicate that Africa is responsible for ~70% of global burned area and ~50% of fire-related carbon emissions. Previous studies have documented an overall decline in burned area in the African continent, but changes in fire patterns,

Long-term changes in the East Asian summer monsoon (EASM) lifecycle since 1979 are analyzed based on observational datasets and historical simulations of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6). According to the observation, the active and break phases of EASM have intensified resulting in a shorter but stronger rainy season, followed by a longer dry spell. This intensification in

The forests of Central Africa contain some of Earth’s few remaining intact forests. These forests are increasingly threatened by infrastructure development, agriculture, and unsustainable extraction of natural resources (e.g. minerals, bushmeat, and timber), all of which is leading to deforestation and forest degradation, particularly defaunation, and hence causing declines in biodiversity and a significant

To date, COVID-19 has claimed more than 100 000 American lives. Early inquiry suggests preexisting conditions are key risk factors contributing to COVID-19 mortality and air pollution exposure could exacerbate this relationship. Building on prior research linking deaths from respiratory viruses to air pollution exposures, we investigate how 2014 National Air Toxics Assessment hazardous air pollutants

The surface warming response to carbon emissions is diagnosed using a suite of Earth system models, 9 CMIP6 and 7 CMIP5, following an annual 1% rise in atmospheric CO 2 over 140 years. This surface warming response defines a climate metric, the Transient Climate Response to cumulative carbon Emissions (TCRE), which is important in estimating how much carbon may be emitted to avoid dangerous climate

Fishery observers are prevalent actors in the global effort to reduce discards in fisheries, but there remains considerable uncertainty about how effective they are. We analyzed high-resolution logbook records of individual hauls ( n = 127 415) across five-and-a-half-years (2012–2018) for all of Greenland’s large-scale fisheries to determine if onboard fishery observers influence the mandatory reporting

Biofuel production is a key strategy for reducing CO 2 emissions globally and is expected to increase substantially in the coming decades, particularly in tropical developing countries. The adoption of sustainable biofuel production technologies that do not place large demands on agricultural or forested lands, has the potential to make a substantial contribution to decreasing greenhouse gas emissions

System-level integration and optimization of food-energy-water systems (FEWS) require coordination of multiple agencies and decision-makers and incorporating their interdependence. In general, such coordination might be hard to achieve. As a result, the literature on FEWS management either optimizes the operations for one sector (or one decision-maker), or models interdependence among the sectors without

Forest management and disturbances are among the main drivers of changes in forest dynamics in temperate ecosystems. To promote and maintain forest multifunctionality and species persistence in the landscape, it is critical that the interactions between these factors and forest biodiversity are disentangled. Still, the relationships between disturbances and forest management are poorly understood and

Recently, the issue of air quality in South Korea reached an unprecedented level of social concern regarding public health, quality of life, and environmental policies, even as the level of particulate matter less than 10 μ m (PM 10 ) showed a decreasing trend. Why have social concerns emerged in recent years, specifically after 2013–2014? This study aims to understand how people perceive air quality

We examine how levels of multiple ecosystem services (ESs) change with succession in forests with different tree species composition. More specifically we ask how ecosystem age interacts with environmental conditions to regulate ES delivery. Using the nationwide Swedish forest inventory, comprising boreal and temperate regions, we investigated how levels of six provisioning, regulating, recreational