Topic: Climate Change

Health & MedicineOctober 30, 2026

Climate change threatens malaria elimination in the Asia Pacific.

Climate change threatens decades of progress toward malaria elimination across the Asia Pacific. In recent years, reported cases have increased sharply in several regions, including Pakistan following the 2022 floods. However, current research and adaptation strategies have largely focused on gradual warming and shifting transmission seasons and may not fully capture acute operational disruptions in endemic settings. Here we examine how climate change influences malaria through cascading disrupt

EnvironmentOctober 27, 2026

Diminishing cooling returns of urban greening amid a warming climate.

Urban greening is widely prioritized as a nature-based solution to mitigating intensifying heat extremes in the context of climate change, yet its long-term global efficacy remains inadequately quantified. Here we present a two-decade assessment of vegetation dynamics and associated cooling effects across 3,806 urban clusters worldwide, integrating multisource satellite observations with ground measurements from 4,855 meteorological stations. We identify a pronounced climate equity gap: While ci

EnvironmentOctober 21, 2026

Drought and disease trigger novel interactions among top predators.

Interactions among species are increasingly recognized as key determinants of climate change impacts on ecosystems 1-5 . However, we know little about how climatic perturbations affect interactions among top vertebrate predators. Here we show that, when an emergent disease caused the decline of shared prey (rabbits), after decades of neutral co-existence a mammalian carnivore (lynx) started to prey heavily on a top predatory raptor (kites). These predation bouts occurred exclusively under drough

EnvironmentOctober 20, 2026

Evolution shapes ecosystem resilience through spatial self-organization.

Drylands are globally widespread and ecologically important but vulnerable to climate change. Many exhibit spatially self-organized vegetation patterns that enhance resilience by enabling vegetation to reorganize their patterns under drying, thereby optimizing water use and maintaining productivity. Plants can also undergo evolution in response to environmental change. Although both spatial self-organization and rapid evolution are fundamental mechanisms of resilience, their interaction remains

EnvironmentOctober 20, 2026

Thermal imbalance drives avian performance and responses to climate warming.

Thermal performance curves are widely used to predict ectothermic responses to climate warming but are less effective for predicting endotherm performance across environmental conditions because thermoregulation often decouples body temperature from ambient temperature. We develop theory and provide empirical evidence for performance curves in endotherms structured by net sensible heat flux (Q), an integrative index of thermoregulatory imbalance. Using biophysical simulations in tree swallows, w

EnvironmentOctober 15, 2026

Nearly half of reef-building corals face elevated relative risk of extinction.

Coral reefs are diverse marine ecosystems that provide ecological functions and economic and social benefits across over 100 tropical countries. Warming driven by climate change is a primary threat to coral reefs and is increasing the frequency of global coral bleaching events. Here we reassessed the IUCN Red List status of 892 reef-building coral species, first assessed in 2008 1 . Because species-level population trends are unavailable for most reef-building corals, population reductions were

EnvironmentOctober 13, 2026

Global grassland productivity and carbon storage benefit from functional diversity under climate change.

Functional diversity plays an important role for ecosystem services of managed grasslands such as their gross primary productivity (GPP) and soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks. Yet vegetation models assessing functional diversity have been limited to small spatial scales. We used the Lund-Potsdam-Jena managed land (LPJmL) competitor stress-tolerant ruderal (CSR) model to assess the role of functional diversity for managed grassland GPP and SOC under climate change at the global scale. LPJmL-CSR si

EnvironmentOctober 6, 2026

Fragmentation outweighs forest cover in shaping land surface temperature across half of global forests.

Forests are widely recognized for their significant role in climate change mitigation. Global landscape-scale assessments have focused mainly on how forest cover (FC) affects temperature. Yet, changes in forest area are generally accompanied by altered fragmentation, and both the independent effect of fragmentation on forest thermal environments and its contribution relative to FC remain insufficiently understood. We disentangled the respective relationships of fragmentation and FC with land sur

EconomicsSeptember 29, 2026

Global greenhouse gas cobenefits of US irrigated agriculture.

Land use and land conversion for agriculture contribute nearly a quarter of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, making the sector a key priority for emissions reductions. Crop yields are one factor that modulate agricultural land demand, with, all else equal, global land use change increasing with yield declines and decreasing with yield gains. Therefore, agricultural practices drive both direct, on-farm emissions, and indirect land use change emissions through yield effects. Here, we couple

EnvironmentSeptember 29, 2026

Manure to insect farming for feed mitigates nitrogen and greenhouse gas emissions.

Livestock manure is nutrient-rich and represents a promising feedstock for insect farming, with insect protein offering a high-quality alternative to conventional crop-based livestock feed. This pathway has substantial potential to mitigate nitrogen (N) and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from livestock systems. Here, we integrate global livestock models with trade, land-use, and cost-benefit analysis to quantify the environmental and economic implications of manure-to-insect conversion while ens

EnvironmentSeptember 29, 2026

Climate mitigation contributes more to population persistence than evolutionary adaptation in a long-lived seabird.

Evolutionary rescue-the process by which adaptive evolution prevents population extinction following environmental deterioration -is frequently proposed as a buffer against biodiversity loss under climate change, yet its capacity to alter future population trajectories is rarely assessed quantitatively. Most forecasts of evolutionary rescue rely on simplified demographic models, focus on a single adaptive trait, and explore hypothetical environmental scenarios rather than standardized climate pa

EnvironmentSeptember 22, 2026

Earthquake-triggered cascading hazards under Arctic amplification.

Arctic warming is reshaping permafrost and glacierized terrains, potentially changing their natural hazards in response to seismic shaking. On 10 March 2025, a Mw 6.5 oceanic transform fault earthquake near Jan Mayen Island in the Arctic Ocean triggered a large rock avalanche that buried part of the Kjerulf Glacier, generating infrasound signals and glacier calving. Using seismic, Global Navigation Satellite System data, infrasound records, satellite imagery, and long-term climatological records

EnvironmentSeptember 15, 2026

Evolution of flowering phenology over 44 years of climate change.

Evolution is expected to be crucial for the persistence of some populations exposed to changing climate, but demonstrations of rapid evolution in wild populations associated with ongoing climate change are scarce. Inferences about possible adaptive responses rest heavily on "space-for-time" approaches that are fraught with assumptions that are difficult to verify. In contrast, resurrection experiments offer a direct method to observe evolutionary changes over time but rarely span the periods of

EnvironmentSeptember 3, 2026

Rising plant extinction rates on European mountain summits.

Climate change increases plant species richness in alpine ecosystems. However, to what extent this diversity enrichment masks extinction dynamics of resident species remains elusive. In this study, we used floristic resurvey data from 896 permanent vegetation plots across 62 European mountain summits to show that local extinctions have increased over the past 21 years. Extinction rates rose with the magnitude of warming, and species were more likely to go extinct toward their low-elevation range

EnvironmentAugust 25, 2026

Marine heatwaves and undernutrition in low- and middle-income countries.

Marine heatwaves are accelerating under climate change and increasingly threaten the lives and livelihoods of coastal populations, particularly in low- and middle-income countries where many households directly depend on local marine fisheries for protein, micronutrients, and income. To quantify this threat, we link individual-level data on child and maternal health from 9,813 coastal sites in 36 low- or middle-income countries to heatwave exposures in the nearby ocean, and use this linked datas

EnvironmentAugust 24, 2026

Pelagic food web realignment supports resilient larvae of Southern Bluefin Tuna in a warming ocean

Many of the oceans’ top predatory fishes at low to mid latitudes face an uncertain future as their vulnerable larvae deal with higher environmental temperature and reduced productivity associated with climate change. However, ocean ecosystem models that predict a general decline of zooplankton prey with warming and stratification hardly ever account for complexities in pelagic food webs that might make them resilient in providing food resources for larvae. We illustrate such complexities in comp

EnvironmentMay 26, 2026

Scientists Create Global Treasure Map Pointing to Hidden Rare Earth Deposits

Scientists have created a global map for rare earth elements by uncovering where the volcanic rocks that contain them are most likely to form, combining thousands of geological samples with machine learning.