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...