Communications Earth & Environment最新文献

Sustainability certifications have rapidly gained prominence and become standards across many industries, yet knowledge about the potential unintended consequences of their criteria remains limited. Here, we use European Space Agency multispectral imagery satellite data in combination with economic and location data to investigate whether the certification process for palm oil production results in unintended consequences. Our results indicate decreases in plantation efficiency both prior to and following the certification obtainment. Our findings highlight the importance of considering possible unintended consequences of sustainability certifications beyond their immediate goals and criteria.

The export of organic carbon from terrestrial ecosystems by erosion may play a central role in balancing the geological carbon cycle and Earth's climate over millennial timescales. However, constraints on organic carbon yields have come from sampling modern rivers that don't capture variation over decades to millennia driven by changing hydroclimate and erosion during extreme events. Here we use volumetric reconstructions of lake sedimentary fills to generate timeseries of sediment and organic carbon yields from two catchments draining the Southern Alps, New Zealand over the last millennium. The reconstructed yields indicate that earthquake-induced landslides significantly increase sediment and organic carbon yields, contributing to pulsed export that accounts for ~40% of the total. Between extreme events, organic carbon export increased twofold during centuries with a wetter reconstructed climate. Our findings suggest that the link between hydroclimate and organic carbon export may act as a negative feedback in the longer-term carbon cycle.

Central Asia hosts some of the world's last relatively healthy mountain glaciers and is heavily dependent on snow and ice melt for downstream water supply, though the causes of this stable glacier state are not known. We combine recent in-situ observations, climate reanalysis and remote sensing data to force a land-surface model to reconstruct glacier changes over the last two decades (1999-2023) and disentangle their causes over a benchmark glacierized catchment in Tajikistan. We show that snowfall and snow depth have been substantially lower since 2018, leading to a decline in glacier health and reduced runoff generation. Remote-sensing observations confirm wider snow depletion across the Northwestern Pamirs, suggesting that a lack of snowfall might be a cause of mass losses regionally. Our results provide an explanation for the recent decline in glacier health in the region, and reinforce the need to better understand the variability of precipitation.

Forecasting catastrophic failures that threaten life and property remains a formidable challenge. A major hurdle lies in the intermittent rupture dynamics of heterogeneous materials. This erratic pattern challenges conventional time-to-failure predictive models, which typically assume a smooth, monotonic power law acceleration. Here, we propose a unified failure model based on a log-periodic power law that encapsulates the intermittent acceleration-deceleration sequences within a single framework. We validate this unified model using a global dataset of 109 historical geohazard events including landslides, rockbursts, glacier breakoffs, and volcanic eruptions, spanning a century and across seven continents. We show that our model significantly outperforms the conventional approach, offering a robust and versatile framework for describing the complex rupture behavior of diverse geomaterials such as rock, soil, and ice at the site scale. This unified perspective not only broadens the model's applicability across diverse geohazards but also highlights its potential to enhance early warning systems.

Mass loss from ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica has quadrupled since the 1990s and now represents the dominant source of global mean sea-level rise from the cryosphere. This has raised concerns about their future stability and focussed attention on the global mean temperature thresholds that might trigger more rapid retreat or even collapse, with renewed calls to meet the more ambitious target of the Paris Climate Agreement and limit warming to +1.5 °C above pre-industrial. Here we synthesise multiple lines of evidence to show that +1.5 °C is too high and that even current climate forcing (+1.2 °C), if sustained, is likely to generate several metres of sea-level rise over the coming centuries, causing extensive loss and damage to coastal populations and challenging the implementation of adaptation measures. To avoid this requires a global mean temperature that is cooler than present and which we hypothesise to be closer to +1 °C above pre-industrial, possibly even lower, but further work is urgently required to more precisely determine a 'safe limit' for ice sheets.

Market-based instruments, including competitive tenders, are central to funding global environmental restoration and management projects. Recently, tenders have been utilised to fund Nature-based Solutions schemes for Natural Flood Management, with the explicit purpose of achieving co-benefits; flood management and reducing inequities. While multiple studies consider the efficacy of Nature-based Solutions for tackling inequities, no prior research has quantified whether the resource allocation for these projects has been conducted equitably. We analyse two national natural flood management programmes funded through competitive tenders in England to explore who benefits by considering the characteristics of projects, including socio-economic, geographical (e.g. rurality) and flood risk dynamics. Our results suggest that inequity occurs at both the application and funding stages of Nature-based Solutions projects for flood risk management. This reflects wider international challenges of using market-based instruments for environmental resource allocation. Competitive tenders have the potential to undermine the equitable benefits of Nature-based Solutions.

The extinction of woody vegetation in Antarctica remains difficult to constrain due to its fragmented macrofossil record. Despite its long-standing polar position, Antarctica hosted extensive vegetation throughout the Paleogene. This changed near the Eocene-Oligocene Transition (ca. 34 Ma) as glaciation led to vegetation decline. Sparse evidence suggests tundra-like forests persisted until the Pliocene in East Antarctica, but the Neogene record from West Antarctica is largely restricted to palynoflora data. Here, we report early Miocene plant macrofossils from West Antarctica, consisting of Nothofagus leaves. U-Pb zircon geochronology confirms tundra-like vegetation existed in this region during the early Miocene (ca. 22-20 Ma), representing the youngest macrofossil record of West Antarctica. These findings suggest that Nothofagus either persisted through Antarctica's harsh Late Cenozoic Ice Age conditions or recolonised during intermittent warm periods. This substantially advances our understanding of West Antarctica's vegetation history and extends the known record of Nothofagus in Antarctic ecosystems.

Projecting future climate change is important for implementing the 2015 Paris Agreement, which aims to limit greenhouse gas emissions to a level that would keep the global average temperature increase to 2100 below 2 °C. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change uses emissions scenarios for projecting climate change, but since 2017, an alternative fully statistical Bayesian probabilistic approach has been developed. Both approaches rely on an equation that expresses emissions as the product of population, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, and carbon intensity, namely carbon emissions per unit of GDP. Here, we use data on these quantities for 2015-2024 to probabilistically assess the changes in climate change prospects associated with post-Paris emissions. These show that carbon intensity declined (i.e., improved) substantially over that period, but that overall carbon emissions rose, due to the rapid rise in world GDP, which more than canceled out the progress made. We found that the projected temperature increase to 2100 declined only slightly, from 2.6° C to 2.4 °C. Meanwhile, the chance of staying below 2 °C remained low, at 17%. However, the chance of the most catastrophic climate change, above 3 °C, has gone down substantially, from 26% to 9%.

Accurate basal melt prediction is crucial for assessing ice sheet stability and sea level rise. Recent observations at eastern Thwaites Glacier reported low melt rates despite warm ocean waters. Weak vertical mixing due to low current speeds and strong density stratification suppresses melting. However, the basal melt parameterization approach in ocean models overestimates the melt rates there. Hence, we revisit the parameterization by applying an ice-ocean boundary current model to a simple horizontal ice base. This setting creates a boundary layer (BL) over a dynamically stable pycnocline. We show that the pycnocline's low diffusivity restricts heat transfer, causing models to overpredict melting, especially for weaker far-field currents. While reducing the prescribed BL depth can minimize this overprediction in ocean models, a better fix might be prescribing an upper melt rate limit for slower currents. We also propose a physics-based parameterization framework that more accurately emulates physics in models and observations.

Altered fire regimes are a global challenge, increasingly exacerbated by climate change, which modifies fire weather and prolongs fire seasons. These changing conditions heighten the vulnerability of ecosystems and human populations to the impacts of wildfires on the environment, society, and the economy. The rapid pace of these changes exposes significant gaps in knowledge, tools, technology, and governance structures needed to adopt informed, holistic approaches to fire management that address both current and future challenges. Integrated Fire Management is an approach that combines fire prevention, response, and recovery while integrating ecological, socio-economic, and cultural factors into management strategies. However, Integrated Fire Management remains highly context-dependent, encompassing a wide array of fire management practices with varying degrees of ecological and societal integration. This review explores Integrated Fire Management as both an adaptation and mitigation strategy for altered fire regimes. It provides an overview of the progress and challenges associated with implementing Integrated Fire Management across different regions worldwide. The review also proposes five core objectives and outlines a roadmap of incremental steps for advancing Integrated Fire Management as a strategy to adapt to ongoing and future changes in fire regimes, thereby maximizing its potential to benefit both people and nature.