{"title":"Changing wildfire complexity highlights the need for institutional adaptation","authors":"Branda Nowell, Kate Jones, Shannon McGovern","doi":"10.1038/s41558-025-02367-1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02367-1","url":null,"abstract":"<p>As wildfires grow increasingly complex, institutional adaptation—adjusting institutions to respond effectively to environmental changes—is crucial for enhancing wildfire management capabilities. However, institutional adaptation is a challenge as the connection between environmental changes and human institutions remains poorly understood. Here, by analysing trends in five incident characteristics linked to institutional complexity at national and regional levels from 1999 to 2020 in the USA, we show national trends of increasing institutional complexity of wildfire indicators associated with wildfire governance, logistics, management, resource scarcity and network coordination. Substantial regional variation was observed, with some cases exhibiting trends in opposite directions. For example, while average jurisdictional complexity showed an increase in the west, it decreased in the east. These results offer insight into the linkage between environmental change and demands for institutional adaptation and provide an empirical basis for considering potential trade-offs of different institutional adaptations in light of competing pressures.</p>","PeriodicalId":18974,"journal":{"name":"Nature Climate Change","volume":"52 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":30.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144488386","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"地球科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nathaniel Robinson, C. Ronnie Drever, David A. Gibbs, Kristine Lister, Adriane Esquivel-Muelbert, Viola Heinrich, Philippe Ciais, Celso H. L. Silva-Junior, Zhihua Liu, Thomas A. M. Pugh, Sassan Saatchi, Yidi Xu, Susan C. Cook-Patton
{"title":"Protect young secondary forests for optimum carbon removal","authors":"Nathaniel Robinson, C. Ronnie Drever, David A. Gibbs, Kristine Lister, Adriane Esquivel-Muelbert, Viola Heinrich, Philippe Ciais, Celso H. L. Silva-Junior, Zhihua Liu, Thomas A. M. Pugh, Sassan Saatchi, Yidi Xu, Susan C. Cook-Patton","doi":"10.1038/s41558-025-02355-5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02355-5","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Avoiding severe global warming requires large-scale removals of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Forest regeneration offers cost-effective carbon removals, but annual rates vary substantially by location and forest age. Here we generate grid-level (~1-km<sup>2</sup>) growth curves for aboveground live carbon in naturally regrowing forests by combining 109,708 field estimates with 66 environmental covariates. Across the globe and the first 100 years of growth, maximum carbon removal rates varied 200-fold, with the greatest rates estimated in ~20- to 40-year-old forests. Despite a focus on new forests for natural climate solutions, protecting existing young secondary forests can provide up to 8-fold more carbon removal per hectare than new regrowth. These maps could help to target the optimal ages and locations where a key carbon removal strategy could be applied, and improve estimates of how secondary forests contribute to global carbon cycling.</p>","PeriodicalId":18974,"journal":{"name":"Nature Climate Change","volume":"45 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":30.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144370813","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"地球科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
James D. Ford, Robbert Biesbroek, Lea Berrang Ford, Felix Creutzig, Neal Haddaway, Sherilee Harper, Jan C. Minx, Mark New, Anne J. Sietsma, Carol Zavaleta-Cortijo, Max Callaghan
{"title":"Author Correction: Recommendations for producing knowledge syntheses to inform climate change assessments","authors":"James D. Ford, Robbert Biesbroek, Lea Berrang Ford, Felix Creutzig, Neal Haddaway, Sherilee Harper, Jan C. Minx, Mark New, Anne J. Sietsma, Carol Zavaleta-Cortijo, Max Callaghan","doi":"10.1038/s41558-025-02378-y","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02378-y","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Correction to: <i>Nature Climate Change</i> https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02354-6, published online 10 June 2025.</p>","PeriodicalId":18974,"journal":{"name":"Nature Climate Change","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":30.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144341487","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"地球科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Social strategies to engage video gamers in climate action","authors":"Jennifer Carman, Marija Verner, Marina Psaros","doi":"10.1038/s41558-025-02369-z","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02369-z","url":null,"abstract":"Video games are a popular method for climate change communication, but current efforts undervalue the potential role of gaming communities. To empower gaming communities to take climate action, we suggest social strategies including fostering climate change conversations through games and in gaming social spaces, and organizing real-world gaming community events.","PeriodicalId":18974,"journal":{"name":"Nature Climate Change","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":30.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144328789","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"地球科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Mark M. Dekker, Andries F. Hof, Yann du Robiou Pont, Nicole van den Berg, Vassilis Daioglou, Michel den Elzen, Rik van Heerden, Elena Hooijschuur, Isabela Schmidt Tagomori, Chantal Würschinger, Detlef P. van Vuuren
{"title":"Navigating the black box of fair national emissions targets","authors":"Mark M. Dekker, Andries F. Hof, Yann du Robiou Pont, Nicole van den Berg, Vassilis Daioglou, Michel den Elzen, Rik van Heerden, Elena Hooijschuur, Isabela Schmidt Tagomori, Chantal Würschinger, Detlef P. van Vuuren","doi":"10.1038/s41558-025-02361-7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02361-7","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Current national emissions targets fall short of the Paris Agreement goals, prompting the need for equitable ways to close this gap. Fair emissions allowances rely on effort-sharing formulas based on fairness principles, yielding diverse outcomes. These variations, shaped by normative decisions, complicate policymaking and legal assessments of climate targets. Here we provide up-to-date numbers, comprehensively accounting for three dimensions—physical and social uncertainties, global strategies and equity—and the relative impact of them on each country’s emissions allowance. In the short run, normative considerations substantially impact fair emissions allowances—directing current discussions to this debate—while global discussions on temperature targets and non-CO<sub>2</sub> emissions take over in the long run. We identify many countries with insufficient nationally determined contributions in light of fairness and discuss implications for increased domestic mitigation and financing emissions reductions abroad—yielding a total international finance flux of $US0.5–7.4 trillion in 2030.</p>","PeriodicalId":18974,"journal":{"name":"Nature Climate Change","volume":"10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":30.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144296158","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"地球科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Peijin Li, Rongqi Zhu, Haewon McJeon, Edward Byers, Peijie Zhou, Yang Ou
{"title":"Using deep learning to generate key variables in global mitigation scenarios","authors":"Peijin Li, Rongqi Zhu, Haewon McJeon, Edward Byers, Peijie Zhou, Yang Ou","doi":"10.1038/s41558-025-02352-8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02352-8","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Integrated assessment models (IAMs) are the dominant tools for projecting mitigation scenarios. However, IAM-based scenarios often face challenges such as modelling biases and large computational burden. Here we develop a deep learning framework to generate key variables through synthetic mitigation scenarios aligned with the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) Scenarios Database. By analysing 1,202 scenarios from a diverse set of IAMs, we select key drivers that enable a more detailed sectoral representation. Next, we trained three generative deep learning models to produce 30,000 synthetic scenarios at low computational cost across various IPCC AR6 climate categories, replicating variable distributions and correlations while also demonstrating physical consistency in power sector variables through internal validation checks. We found that the variational autoencoder achieved the highest label transferring accuracy among three frameworks. This study illustrates the potential of deep learning to complement IAM approaches and provides a basis for handling complex mitigation scenario generation tasks.</p>","PeriodicalId":18974,"journal":{"name":"Nature Climate Change","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":30.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144278568","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"地球科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Elisa Bergas-Masso, Douglas S. Hamilton, Stelios Myriokefalitakis, Sagar Rathod, María Gonçalves Ageitos, Carlos Pérez García-Pando
{"title":"Future climate-driven fires may boost ocean productivity in the iron-limited North Atlantic","authors":"Elisa Bergas-Masso, Douglas S. Hamilton, Stelios Myriokefalitakis, Sagar Rathod, María Gonçalves Ageitos, Carlos Pérez García-Pando","doi":"10.1038/s41558-025-02356-4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02356-4","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Rapid shifts in fire regimes affect the carbon cycle by releasing carbon and nutrients such as iron (Fe), potentially enhancing marine productivity and carbon export. Here we use fire emission projections and Earth system models to examine how climate-driven changes in fire emissions may alter soluble Fe (SFe) deposition and productivity. By century’s end, climate change could increase Fe emissions from fires by 1.7–1.8 times beyond projections considering only direct human influences. Model projections show rising SFe deposition in Northern Hemisphere high latitudes under increasing socio-economic activity, potentially boosting the impact of SFe deposition on productivity in the Fe-limited North Atlantic by up to 20% annually (40% in summer), assuming stable macronutrient levels. However, declining macronutrient availability may shrink Fe-limited areas, where climate-driven fires could offset productivity losses by 7–8%. In the Southern Ocean, fossil fuel emissions primarily control SFe deposition, as reductions in anthropogenic fires counterbalance climate-driven increases.</p>","PeriodicalId":18974,"journal":{"name":"Nature Climate Change","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":30.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144278821","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"地球科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Aruna Sankaranarayanan, Piotr Sapiezynski, Una-May O’Reilly
{"title":"Facebook algorithm’s active role in climate advertisement delivery","authors":"Aruna Sankaranarayanan, Piotr Sapiezynski, Una-May O’Reilly","doi":"10.1038/s41558-025-02326-w","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02326-w","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Climate advertising on social media can shape attitudes towards climate change. Delivery algorithms, as key actors in the climate communication ecosystem, determine ad audience selection and might introduce demographic bias. Here, we present a two-part study—an observational analysis (<i>n</i> = 253,125) and a field experiment (<i>M</i> = 650)—to investigate algorithmic bias in Facebook’s climate ad dissemination. Our findings provide preliminary evidence that the algorithm’s selection of ad audiences can be explained by factors such as ad content, audience location (US states), gender and age group. Moreover, the cost-effectiveness of contrarian ads is linked with the conservative political alignment of a state, while the cost-effectiveness of advocacy ads correlates with liberal political alignment, higher population and per-capita gross domestic product; ad targeting strategies further modulate these effects. The skew in the distribution of climate ads across US states, age groups and genders reinforces existing climate attitudes.</p>","PeriodicalId":18974,"journal":{"name":"Nature Climate Change","volume":"70 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":30.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144278822","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"地球科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Exploring climate futures with deep learning","authors":"Alaa Al Khourdajie","doi":"10.1038/s41558-025-02350-w","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02350-w","url":null,"abstract":"Glancing forward to view alternative futures for limiting global warming requires understanding complex societal–environmental systems that drive future emissions. Now a study explores the potential, and limits, of deep learning to generate core characteristics of these futures.","PeriodicalId":18974,"journal":{"name":"Nature Climate Change","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":30.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144278820","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"地球科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
James D. Ford, Robbert Biesbroek, Lea Berrang Ford, Felix Creutzig, Neal Haddaway, Sherilee Harper, Jan C. Minx, Mark New, Anne J. Sietsma, Carol Zavaleta-Cortijo, Max Callaghan
{"title":"Recommendations for producing knowledge syntheses to inform climate change assessments","authors":"James D. Ford, Robbert Biesbroek, Lea Berrang Ford, Felix Creutzig, Neal Haddaway, Sherilee Harper, Jan C. Minx, Mark New, Anne J. Sietsma, Carol Zavaleta-Cortijo, Max Callaghan","doi":"10.1038/s41558-025-02354-6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02354-6","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Climate change assessments (CCAs) play a critical role in taking stock of the available science and other forms of knowledge and informing policy processes. As the underlying evidence base increases exponentially, the complexity also increases and challenges CCA author teams to capture all the relevant knowledge. Therefore, CCAs will need to transition from predominantly assessing primary research to focusing on the assessment and critical appraisal of knowledge syntheses of such work, alongside capturing knowledges held outside traditional scientific sources. To support this, a stronger knowledge synthesis culture is needed, and we propose key recommendations and offer guidance for producing robust, transparent, reproducible, inclusive and timely syntheses that can inform CCAs across scales.</p>","PeriodicalId":18974,"journal":{"name":"Nature Climate Change","volume":"87 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":30.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144252361","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"地球科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}