Top Research Papers on Climate Change

This Working Group III contribution to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report provides a comprehensive and transparent assessment of the literature on climate change mitigation. The report assesses progress in climate change mitigation options for reducing emissions and enhancing sinks. With greenhouse gas emissions at the highest levels in human history, this report provides options to achieve net zero, as pledged by many countries. The report highlights for the first time the social and demand-side aspects of climate mitigation, and assesses the literature on human behaviour, lifestyle, and cultur...

Cities are particularly vulnerable to extreme weather episodes, which are expected to increase with climate change. Cities also influence their own local climate, for example, through the relative warming known as the urban heat island (UHI) effect. This review discusses urban climate features (even in complex terrain) and processes. We then present state-of-the-art methodologies on the generalization of a common urban neighborhood classification for UHI studies, as well as recent developments in observation systems and crowdsourcing approaches. We discuss new modeling paradigms pertinent to c...

This special collection examines insurance as an increasingly central mechanism in shaping how the effects of climate change are transforming local economies and ways of life. The papers study a range of exemplary cases, ranging from agricultural micro-insurance in development policy and regional sovereign risk facilities in the Caribbean to public and private insurance in the United States. This framing essay situates these papers in a longer tradition of scholarship on the government of risk and security. It also describes three themes that run through the papers: the economization of climat...

Human behavior plays a critical role in causing global climate change as well as in responding to it. In this article, I review important insights on the psychology of climate change. I first discuss factors that affect the likelihood that individuals engage in a wide range of climate actions. Next, I review the processes through which values affect climate actions and reflect on how to motivate climate actions among people who do not strongly care about nature, the environment, and climate change. Then I explain that even people who may be motivated to engage in climate actions may not do so ...

This work argues that behavioural models exist to explain and predict mitigation and adaptation behaviours, but their utility in establishing meaningful change is limited due to their being too reductive, individualistic, linear, deliberative and blind to environmental impact.

Climate change is one of the greatest ecological and social challenges of the twenty-first century. Sociologists have made important contributions to our knowledge of the human drivers of contemporary climate change, including better understanding of the effects of social structure and political economy on national greenhouse gas emissions, the interplay of power and politics in the corporate sector and in policy systems, and the factors that influence individual actions by citizens and consumers. Sociology is also poised to make important contributions to the study of climate justice across m...

Many climate-relevant behaviours are habitual. Habits are memory-based propensities to respond automatically to specific cues, acquired by repetition of behaviours in stable contexts. Socio-cognitive models are widely used to predict climate-relevant behaviours, but by positing behaviour as intentional, provide a poor account of habitual behaviours. While unsustainable habits are barriers to change, their very features (frequent, automatic and resistant to change) also make them desirable for sustainable behaviours to obtain. While informational approaches are generally ineffective for breakin...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the leading international body for assessing the science related to climate change. It provides policymakers with regular assessments of the scientific basis of human-induced climate change, its impacts and future risks, and options for adaptation and mitigation. This IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land (SRCCL) is the most comprehensive and up-to-date scientific assessment of the multiple interactions between climate change and land, assessing climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food ...

This scoping review of the literature summarises the effects that climate change is having on major cancers, from environmental exposures to ultraviolet radiation, air pollution, disruptions in the food and water supply, environmental toxicants, and infectious agents.

Climate change is a defining element of the current ecological landscape, with consequences ranging from global to local environments and research has moved beyond simple descriptions of these temporal changes to investigations of their root causes, impacts, and consequences at both ecological and evolutionary time scales.

The nature of climate anxiety and some evidence for its existence are discussed, and ways to address it are speculated about.

Abstract It is generally accepted that climate change is having a negative impact on food security. However, most of the literature variously focuses on the complex and many mechanisms linking climate stressors; the links with food production or productivity rather than food security; and future rather than current effects. In contrast, we investigate the extent to which current changes in food insecurity can be plausibly attributed to climate change. We combine food insecurity data for 83 countries from the FAO food insecurity experience scale (FIES) with reanalysed climate data from ERA5-Lan...

The potential impact of global warming on ectotherm ageing is explored through its effects on reactive oxygen species production, oxidative damage, and telomere shortening, at the individual and intergenerational levels.

Prudent risk management requires consideration of bad-to-worst-case scenarios. Yet, for climate change, such potential futures are poorly understood. Could anthropogenic climate change result in worldwide societal collapse or even eventual human extinction? At present, this is a dangerously underexplored topic. Yet there are ample reasons to suspect that climate change could result in a global catastrophe. Analyzing the mechanisms for these extreme consequences could help galvanize action, improve resilience, and inform policy, including emergency responses. We outline current knowledge about ...

This nexus review paper will cover four significant points viz. the possible impacts of climate change, the essence of improving food security, measures to evolve crop, and role of biotechnology and genetic engineering in adaptive introgression of the gene or developing plant transgenic against pests.

Warming temperatures are enabling the migration, introduction, and mounting abundance of thermophilic and thermotolerant fungal species, including those producing mycotoxins, with the effect of influencing the prevalence and co-occurrence of mycotoxins in the future.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the leading international body for assessing the science related to climate change. It provides policymakers with regular assessments of the scientific basis of human-induced climate change, its impacts and future risks, and options for adaptation and mitigation. This IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate is the most comprehensive and up-to-date assessment of the observed and projected changes to the ocean and cryosphere and their associated impacts and risks, with a focus on resilience, risk management res...

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Galappaththi, E.K., Ichien, S.T., Hyman, A.A., Aubrac, C.J. and Ford, J.D. (2020), Climate change adaptation in aquaculture.

Climate change literacy encompasses being aware of both climate change and its anthropogenic cause, and thus underpins informed mitigation and adaptation responses. However, climate change literacy rates and their predictors remain poorly understood across the Global South. Here analysis of Africa’s largest representative public opinion survey shows climate change literacy ranges from 23 to 66% of the population across 33 countries, with larger variation at subnational scales (for example, 5–71% among states in Nigeria). Strong positive predictors of climate change literacy are education and m...

T he effects of climate change are widespread and rapidly intensifying and are largely driven by greenhouse-gas emissions from burning fossil fuels. 1 Global mean temperatures have already increased by 1.1°C since 1900, 1 with most of the change having occurred in the past 50 years.The extent of change is most extreme in highland and polar regions (Fig. 1), and temperatures in tropical regions are creeping closer to the thermal limits of many organisms.Given the current policies and actions, a warming of 2.5°C to 2.9°C or more by the end of this century is expected. 2arming and other manifesta...

The massive expansion of scientific literature on climate change1 poses challenges for global environmental assessments and our understanding of how these assessments work. Big data and machine learning can help us deal with large collections of scientific text, making the production of assessments more tractable, and giving us better insights about how past assessments have engaged with the literature. We use topic modelling to draw a topic map, or topography, of over 400,000 publications from the Web of Science on climate change. We update current knowledge on the IPCC, showing that compared...

It is argued the time has come for scientists to agree to a moratorium on climate change research as a means to first expose, then renegotiate, the broken science-society contract.

This work evaluates the influence of high temperatures exposure on the pathophysiology of neurodegenerative disorders, and investigates chronic versus acute stressors on body warming, and puts forward a possible interpretation of the beneficial or detrimental effects on the brain.

Mental health impacts of climate change have the potential to affect a significant proportion of the population and more research is needed to document the extent of these impacts as well as the best options for mitigating and treating them.

Climate change mitigation not only requires reductions of greenhouse gas emissions, but also withdrawal of carbon dioxide (CO) from the atmosphere. Here we review the relationship between emissions reductions and CO removal by biochar systems, which are based on pyrolysing biomass to produce biochar, used for soil application, and renewable bioenergy. Half of the emission reductions and the majority of CO removal result from the one to two orders of magnitude longer persistence of biochar than the biomass it is made from. Globally, biochar systems could deliver emission reductions of 3.4–6.3 P...

Counteracting the worst effects of human-induced climate change is one of the most daunting challenges of our time. There has been an increased recognition of the important role that human emotions, in particular positive affect, play in shaping people’s climate change-relevant decision-making and collective action. Here, we briefly review the rapidly expanding body of empirical research on positive emotions and climate change, focusing on two distinct yet closely intertwined ways in which positive emotions come into play: as antecedents and as consequences of climate change-relevant engagemen...

We investigate the relationship between exposure to climate change and firm credit risk. We show that the distance-to-default, a widely used market-based measure of corporate default risk, is negatively associated with the amount of a firm’s carbon emissions and carbon intensity. Therefore, companies with high carbon footprint are perceived by the market as more likely to default, ceteris paribus. The carbon footprint decreases the distance-to-default following shocks - such as the Paris Agreement - that reveal policymakers’ intention to implement stricter climate policies. Overall, these resu...

Hailstorms are dangerous and costly phenomena that are expected to change in response to a warming climate. In this Review, we summarize current knowledge of climate change effects on hailstorms. As a result of anthropogenic warming, it is generally anticipated that low-level moisture and convective instability will increase, raising hailstorm likelihood and enabling the formation of larger hailstones; the melting height will rise, enhancing hail melt and increasing the average size of surviving hailstones; and vertical wind shear will decrease overall, with limited influence on the overall ha...

New palaeogeographical reconstructions for the earlier Ordovician (480 Ma), and later Ordovician (450 Ma) integrate revised longitude-calibrated palaeomagnetic reconstructions and the inclusion of synthetic plate margins within the now-vanished oceanic areas. There are substantial published differences from the previous placing of some of the continents and terranes in Asia; for example, Siberia and Gondwana have previously been placed at varied distances and relative positions in relation to the Kazakh terranes, South and North China, and Tarim. But there are only minor changes for most of th...

Insects have diversified through more than 450 million y of Earth’s changeable climate, yet rapidly shifting patterns of temperature and precipitation now pose novel challenges as they combine with decades of other anthropogenic stressors including the conversion and degradation of land. Here, we consider how insects are responding to recent climate change while summarizing the literature on long-term monitoring of insect populations in the context of climatic fluctuations. Results to date suggest that climate change impacts on insects have the potential to be considerable, even when compared ...

The risks of climate change are enormous, threatening the lives and livelihoods of millions to billions of people. The economic consequences of many of the complex risks associated with climate change cannot, however, currently be quantified. Here we argue that these unquantified, poorly understood and often deeply uncertain risks can and should be included in economic evaluations and decision-making processes. We present an overview of these unquantified risks and an ontology of them founded on the reasons behind their lack of robust evaluation. These consist of risks missing owing to delays ...

This review summarizes recent literature regarding the impacts of climate change and related environmental disasters on pregnancy health and provides recommendations to inform future adaptation and mitigation efforts.

The combined effects of heat, air pollution, individual age, and socioeconomic and health status are responsible for avoidable acute events of cardiovascular disease and need to be considered in order to prevent and treat cardiovascular diseases effectively.

Abstract Monsoon rainfall has profound economic and societal impacts for more than two-thirds of the global population. Here we provide a review on past monsoon changes and their primary drivers, the projected future changes, and key physical processes, and discuss challenges of the present and future modeling and outlooks. Continued global warming and urbanization over the past century has already caused a significant rise in the intensity and frequency of extreme rainfall events in all monsoon regions (high confidence). Observed changes in the mean monsoon rainfall vary by region with signif...

Despite a strong scientific consensus, there remains a substantial partisan divide in the U.S. regarding belief in, and attitudes toward, human-caused climate change. A preeminent explanation of this phenomenon is directional 'motivated reasoning', in which new information is processed in service of reaching a pre-determined, desired conclusion. Much existing work theorizes that partisan polarization occurs because members of the two political parties are assimilating new information to fulfill different desired conclusions, rooted in different party norms, values, or prior standing beliefs. H...

This imaginative and empowering book explores the ways that our emotions entangle us with climate change and offers strategies for engaging with climate anxiety that can contribute to social transformation. Climate educator Blanche Verlie draws on feminist, more-than-human and affect theories to argue that people in high-carbon societies need to learn to ‘live-with’ climate change: to appreciate that human lives are interconnected with the climate, and to cultivate the emotional capacities needed to respond to the climate crisis. Learning to Live with Climate Change explores the cultural, inte...

We estimate the risk premium for firm-level climate change exposure among S&P 500 stocks and its time-series evolution between 2005 to 2020. Exposure reflects the attention paid by market participants in earnings calls to a firm’s climate-related risks and opportunities. When extracted from realized returns, the unconditional risk premium is insignificant but exhibits a period with a positive risk premium before the financial crisis and a steady increase thereafter. Forward-looking expected return proxies deliver an unconditionally positive risk premium with maximum values of 0.5%–1% p.a.,...

The current editorial summarized some of the scientific works presented in the Sustainable Energy and Environmental Protection (SEEP) conference-held at the University of the West of Scotland, UK, 2018. The selected work was directly related to the scope of the Renewable, Sustainable Energy Reviews (RSER) journal. During the conference activities, experts from all around the world in the subjects of: renewable energy, climate change, optimization, and economics presented and discussed the progress made in renewable energy sources, as well as the new strategies for protecting the environment fr...

Although these tools have been applied most extensively in the United States, Europe, and the Amazon region, they have not been as widely used in other drought-prone regions throughout the rest of the world, presenting opportunities for future research.

Global food security is threatened by climate change, both directly through responses of crop physiology and productivity, and indirectly through responses of plant-associated microbiota, including plant pathogens. While the interactions between host plants, pathogens and environmental drivers can be complex, recent research is beginning to indicate certain overall patterns in how plant diseases will affect crop production in future. Here, we review the results of three methodological approaches: large-scale observational studies, process-based disease models and experimental comparisons of pa...