Urbanization has been shown to locally increase the nighttime temperatures creating urban heat islands, which partly arise due to evapotranspiration (ET) reduction. It is unclear how the direction and magnitude of the change in local ET due to urbanization varies globally across different climatic regimes. This knowledge gap is critical, both for the key role of ET in the energy and water balance accounting

Understanding urban expansion at the watershed scale is important because watersheds are important carriers of ecological and environmental impacts. However, current analyses are mainly restricted to administrative units only. Here, we used a long-term multitemporal dataset of urban land to quantify the spatiotemporal trends in the extent and form of urban expansion from 1992 to 2016 in endorheic and

No abstract is available for this article.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, China has been undergoing an economic transition consisting of prioritizing green economic and sustainable development instead of rapid growth driven by large-scale investment. However, there is still a lack of fine print on how sub-regional effort can contribute to national or full supply chain mitigation plans, especially downscaling to the city level. To bridge this

As the most severe drought over the Northeastern United States (NEUS) in the past century, the 1960s drought had pronounced socioeconomic impacts. Although it was followed by a persisting wet period, the conditions leading to the 1960s extreme drought could return in the future, along with its challenges to water management. To project the potential consequences of such a future drought, pseudo-global

Adverse environmental effects of international trade are emphasized in the literature frequently. Nevertheless, following a theoretical trade logic, the production of goods in regions with higher resource efficiency may lead to reduced global resource use. In this article, major drivers of food-related material footprint (MF) are analyzed at the global, regional, and country levels. Changes in consumption

Arising from the non-uniform dispersal of sediment and water that build deltaic landscapes, morphological change is a fundamental characteristic of river delta behavior. Thus, sustainable deltas require mobility of their channel networks and attendant shifts in landforms. Both behaviors can be misrepresented as degradation, particularly in context of the “stability” that is generally necessitated by

The reversibility of global mean surface temperature was examined by a transient CO2 reversibility experiment using an Earth system model. The results showed that after CO2 ramp-up toward CO2 quadrupling and ramp-down returned to the present-day level, the global mean surface temperature kept decreasing but stopped to change for ∼40 years in the early net-zero CO2 emission period. This period, referred

Climate change will likely increase the frequency of damaging post-wildfire floods and debris flows, amplifying the threat to life, property, and infrastructure situated in susceptible areas. Decision-makers are in need of resources to support planning for the changing characteristics of these hazards. A novel framework for evaluating post-fire debris flow recurrence intervals (Kean & Staley, 2021

Recent acceleration in the retreat of the Greenland ice sheet under a warming climate has caused unprecedented challenges and threats to coastal communities due to the rising sea level and increasing storm surges. This raises a critical question from a climate mitigation perspective: Would there still be a chance to stabilize the Greenland ice sheet if the carbon reduction goals of the Paris Agreement

The contribution of biomass burning to the total aerosol loading over Monsoon Asia is both significant and continuing to increase. To better match the spatio-temporal distribution of aerosols and trace gasses observed in the free troposphere, this work applied a 3-D constrained emission inventory based on top-down remotely sensed NO2 measurement to investigate the most extreme of the annually occurring

The global evapotranspiration (ET) shows an increasing trend with global warming in recent decades, while ET variation in different regions is still uncertain. Boreal forest ecosystem, as one of the most sensitive regions to climate change, are still poorly understood due to the sparse observation and the changing of ET in the boreal forest has been covered up for lower values compared to lower-latitude

This study seeks to understand how Argentina’s energy, water, and land (EWL) systems will co-evolve under a representative array of human and earth system influences, including socioeconomic change, climate change, and climate policy. To capture Argentina’s sub-national EWL dynamics in the context of global change, we couple the Global Change Analysis Model with a suite of consistent, gridded sectoral

This study provides a literature-based comparative assessment of uncertainties and biases in global to world-regional scale assessments of current and future coastal flood risks, considering mean and extreme sea-level hazards, the propagation of these into the floodplain, people and coastal assets exposed, and their vulnerability. Globally, by far the largest bias is introduced by not considering human

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted social, economic, and environmental systems worldwide, slowing down and reversing the progress made in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). SDGs belong to the 2030 Agenda to transform our world by tackling humankind's challenges to ensure well-being, economic prosperity, and environmental protection. We explore the potential impacts of the pandemic

Eddy-induced transport through the Luzon Strait critically affects the physical and biological properties of the South China Sea (SCS). The eddy-induced volume, heat and salt transport are comprehensively evaluated based on the South China Sea Physical Oceanic Dataset (SCSPOD) observations. To avoid the bias involved in extreme eddy events, 76 shedding anticyclonic eddies, 46 shedding cyclonic eddies

Based on the observational dataset SA-OBS and model outputs from the Community Earth System Model Large Ensemble project, this study investigates heatwaves in Southeast Asia in the current and future warmer climate. A heatwave is detected when the daily maximum temperature exceeds the 90th percentile threshold at each grid for at least three consecutive days. Three characteristics describing the frequency

The Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy (DICE) model is one of the most influential Integrated Assessment Models available. Its founder Professor William Nordhaus was recently awarded Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel due to his pioneering work on the economics of climate change. In a recent paper in American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Nordhaus uses the model

A scientific storytelling approach is used to communicate results from a transdisciplinary model of human-environment estuarine systems for the purpose of developing system understanding and improving transdisciplinary communication. Questionnaires and a media analysis are used to collate public perceptions of observed environmental change in estuarine systems, with an agent-based model developed to

Climate change leads to heat-related changes in labor productivity, which have additional economic impacts. Based on a framework that considers the impacts evolving from climate change to labor productivity to economic impact, we estimate the changes in labor productivity for indoor and outdoor activities and different work intensities at the grid level in China under a wide range of climatic and socioeconomic

The joint exposure of plants to surface ozone, atmospheric aerosols, and heat stress can lead to considerable decreases in crop yields. Surface ozone negatively impacts plant photosynthesis while aerosols can have positive or negative effects from its dual impact on light and temperature. Here, using a statistical model, we show that in the United States, as a result of improvements in air quality

Here we use remotely sensed land surface temperature measurements to explore the distribution of the United States’ urban heating burden, both at high resolution (within cities or counties) and at scale (across the whole contiguous United States). While a rich literature has documented neighborhood-level disparities in urban heat exposures in individual cities, data constraints have precluded comparisons

Water resources are required for cooling of thermoelectric power plants and in the production of hydroelectricity. Scarcity of water resources impacts the ability to generate electricity in grids across the globe. There is extensive literature and research on the electricity-water nexus, spanning hydrology, policy, and energy sectors. Existing research often focuses on quantifying a static relationship

Robust assessments of global carbon uptake are important for understanding Earth's carbon cycle and its response to human impacts. Here, based on the most recent oxygen budget, we presented an alternative estimate of ocean and land carbon sinks over the past few decades and future projections under climate change. For the period from 1990 to 2015, the ocean and land carbon sinks were ∼2.16 ± 0.73 and

Increasing coastal flooding threatens urban centers worldwide. Projections of physical damages to structures and their contents can characterize the monetary scale of risk, but they lack relevant socioeconomic context. The impact of coastal flooding on communities hinges not only on the cost, but on the ability of households to pay for the damages. Here, we repurpose probabilistic risk assessment to

Losses from natural hazards are escalating dramatically, with more properties and critical infrastructure affected each year. Although the magnitude, intensity, and/or frequency of certain hazards has increased, development contributes to this unsustainable trend, as disasters emerge when natural disturbances meet vulnerable assets and populations. To diagnose development patterns leading to increased

Aerosols have a dimming and cooling effect and change hydrological regimes, thus affecting carbon fluxes, which are sensitive to climate. Aerosols also scatter sunlight, which increases the fraction of diffuse radiation, increasing photosynthesis. There remains no clear conclusion whether the impact of aerosols on land carbon fluxes is larger through diffuse radiation change than through changes in

The NARCliM project contributes to the CORDEX initiative for Australasia. The first generation of NARCliM (N1.0) used CMIP3 global climate models (GCMs) and provided near and far future estimates of climate change across Australasia at 50-km and southeast Australia at 10-km resolution under a business-as-usual climate scenario. However, multiple sets of 20-year periods in N1.0 did not permit analysis

Forest ecosystem resilience is of considerable interest worldwide, particularly given the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and recent instances of zoonotic diseases linked to deforestation and forest loss. Novel, digital-based technologies are also increasingly ubiquitous. We provide a more comprehensive understanding of how these new technologies are being used for forest management in different

Population concentration and built-up land expansion are two prominent features of contemporary urbanization. Existing literature on the population aspect of urbanization has mostly focused on national and regional aggregates, and literature on the land development aspect has often relied on spatial case studies of individual cities or their meta-analyses. Using newly-available data, here we conduct

Historical simulations of models participating in the sixth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) are evaluated over 10 Australian regions for their performance in simulating extreme temperatures, among which three models with initial-condition large ensembles (LEs) are used to estimate the effects of internal variability. Based on two observational data sets, the Australian Water

This study investigates changes and uncertainties to cool-season (November-March) storm tides along the U.S. northeast coast in the 21st century under the high RCP8.5 emission scenario compared to late 20th century. A high-fidelity (50-m coastal resolution) hydrodynamic storm tide model is forced with three dynamically downscaled regional climate models (RCMs) over three decadal periods (historical

Deltas and estuaries worldwide face the challenge of capturing sufficient sediment to keep up with relative sea-level rise. Knowledge about sediment pathways and fluxes is crucial to combat adverse effects on channel morphology, for example, erosion which enhances bank collapse and increasing tidal penetration. Here, we construct sediment budgets which quantify annual changes for the urbanized Rhine-Meuse

Cities are increasingly acknowledged as crucial when facing climate change -and the environmental crisis more in general-, offering challenges and opportunities in terms of both mitigation and adaptation. Climate change-sensitive urban governance requires proactive, integrated, and contextualized approaches, making room for the complex, multilayered, multi-scalar, and dynamic processes constituting

No abstract is available for this article.

Climate models exhibit a broad range in the simulated properties of the climate system. In the early historical period, the absolute global mean surface air temperature in Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, Phase 5 (CMIP5) models spans a range of ∼12°C – 15°C. Other climate variables may be linked to global mean temperature, and so accurate representation of the baseline climate state is crucial

Coastal wetlands have two dimensions of vulnerability to sea-level rise (SLR), a vertical one, in cases where SLR outpaces their capacity to vertically accrete, and a lateral one, in cases where they are restricted from migrating inland by topography and land use. We conducted a meta-analysis of accretion rates, standardized our analysis by using only 137Cs based estimates, and used model intercomparison

President Joe Biden's administration is poised to make a significant investment in climate research, including the creation of ARPA-C (Advanced Research Projects Agency–Climate). This commentary serves to promote discourse on ARPA-C and the future of government-led climate research. Here, we propose a revolutionary leap to the ARPA model that incorporates a focus on culture and equity in a unique institutional

A socio-economic crisis was added to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5) scenario. This idealized climate scenario was simulated using the Community Earth System Model version 1.2.2 to determine the transient climate response to a two-year reduction of anthropogenic emissions. Global and regional (Asian, North American and European)

Future climate may profoundly impact the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems. However, we do not know well how the functioning of different types of grassland ecosystems is associated with variation in temperature and precipitation. Here, we used long-term field measurements to examine how climatic changes between the 1980s and the 2010s (i.e., growing season temperature, precipitation, habitat moisture

The “United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” adopted in 2015 covers 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Fire is a common form of disaster and has a wide range of impacts on climate, biogeochemical cycle and human health, highly related to the SDGs. Satellite remote sensing technology provides an effective way for the dynamic monitoring of global burned area (BA). However, the existing

As the “world factory,” China has the most massive anthropogenic atmospheric mercury (Hg) emissions in the world along with its intense production activities. The development of global society and economy, including technology development, consumption behavior evolution, population growth, and so on, would significantly affect China's production and thus the Hg emissions. Here we uncover critical global

We face a new era in the assessment of multiple natural hazards whose statistics are becoming alarmingly non-stationary due to ubiquitous long-term changes in climate. One particular case is tsunami hazard affected by climate-change-driven sea level rise (SLR). A traditional tsunami hazard assessment approach where SLR is omitted or included as a constant sea-level offset in a probabilistic calculation

Untangling the reasons underlying changes in air pollution trajectories and regional emission differences is critical to guide efforts to attain air pollution reduction goals in China. Using Index decomposition analysis and the air pollution emission inventory, we identify the contributions of different regions and sectors to the socioeconomic factors driving China's sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides

Understanding the complex interrelationships between wildfire and its environmental and anthropogenic controls is crucial for wildfire modeling and management. Although machine learning (ML) models have yielded significant improvements in wildfire predictions, their limited interpretability has been an obstacle for their use in advancing understanding of wildfires. This study builds an ML model incorporating

Extreme precipitation has widespread impacts over the western US (WUS), which are expected to be exacerbated in the future given thermodynamically driven increases in atmospheric moisture and shifts in atmospheric circulation patterns. However, internal climate variability complicates how these factors affect future projections of precipitation changes. In this study, we investigate late 21st-century

In this work, we projected future drought risks over East Asia from the perspective of evapotranspiration (ET) deficit using the new climate projections of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6). For the regional drought projections, we employed a state-of-the-art complementary relationship (CR) method to estimate ET and atmospheric evaporative demand (Ep) that quantify the combined

Identifying climate change hotspot regions is critical for planning effective mitigation and adaptation activities. We use standard Euclidean distance (SED) to calculate integrated changes in precipitation and temperature means, interannual variability, and extremes between different future warming levels and a baseline period (1995–2014) using the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6)

Biomass burning contributes considerably to black carbon (BC) emissions in South Asia, but such emissions have not been linked with the Green Revolution (GR) which has enabled substantial crop production growth in South Asian countries, India in particular. Here, we use an Earth system model to quantify climate change through the direct radiative forcing (DRF) by agriculture-emitted BC associated with

Over the last decades, climate science has evolved rapidly across multiple expert domains. Our best tools to capture state-of-the-art knowledge in an internally self-consistent modeling framework are the increasingly complex fully coupled Earth System Models (ESMs). However, computational limitations and the structural rigidity of ESMs mean that the full range of uncertainties across multiple domains

No abstract is available for this article.

The need for explicitly considering equity in climate change adaptation planning is increasingly being recognized. However, evaluations of adaptation often adopt an aggregated perspective, while disaggregation of results is important to learn about who benefits when and where. A typical example is adaptation of rice agriculture in the Vietnam Mekong Delta (VMD). Efforts focused on flood protection

The Arctic faces multiple pressures including climate change, shifting demographics, human health risks, social justice imbalances, governance issues, and expanding resource extraction. A convergence of academic disciplines—such as natural and social sciences, engineering and technology, health and medicine—and international perspectives is required to meaningfully contribute to solving the challenges

Recently, yield shocks due to extreme weather events and their consequences for food security have become a major concern. Although long yield time series are available in Europe, few studies have been conducted to analyze them in order to investigate the impact of adverse climate events on yield shocks under current and future climate conditions. Here we designated the lowest 10th percentile of the

Agricultural irrigation is the major water consumer in the Mediterranean region. In response to the growing pressure on freshwater resources, more efficient irrigation technologies have been widely promoted. In this study, we assess the impact of the ongoing transition from flood to drip irrigation on future hydroclimatic regimes under various climate change scenarios, with a particular focus on actual

Tropical forests play a key role in absorbing carbon from the atmosphere into the land surface. Recent analyses of long-term (1985–2014) forest inventory plots across the tropics show that structurally intact tropical forest are a large carbon sink, but that this sink has saturated and is projected to be in long-term decline. Here we compare these results with estimates from the two latest generations

Australia, the driest inhabited continent, is prone to natural disasters, such as droughts, floods, bushfires, and heatwaves. Strong climate variability causes recurring threats to water supply, agriculture, and the environment. Improving our insight into changes in hydroclimatic patterns is required to provide useful information for society. Previous studies mainly focused on the causes of extreme

The cooccurrence of coastal and riverine flooding leads to compound events with substantial impacts on people and property in low-lying coastal areas. Climate change could increase the level of compound flood hazard through higher extreme sea levels and river flows. Here, a bivariate flood hazard assessment method is proposed to estimate compound coastal-riverine frequency under current and future

Anthropogenic aerosols are hazardous to human health but have helped offset warming from greenhouse gases (GHGs), creating a potential regulatory tradeoff. As countries implement their GHG reduction targets under the Paris climate agreement, the co‐emissions of aerosols and their precursors will also change. Since these co‐emissions vary by country and by economic sector, each country will face different

Wetlands provide multiple ecosystem services of local and global importance, but currently there exists no comprehensive, high‐quality wetland map for the Arctic region. Improved information about Arctic wetland extents and their vulnerability to climate change is essential for adaptation and mitigation efforts, including for indigenous people dependent on the ecosystem services that wetlands provide