Climate change

Adaptation is not a substitute for mitigation. Cutting emissions remains indispensable to preventing the worst outcomes of climate change. Even if we succeed in limiting warming to 1.5°C, we will still face more floods, heatwaves, and ecosystem losses.

Climate science and adaptation strategies can only make an impact in the real world, when people can understand and act upon them.

Two new studies shed light on how hail might change as the world warms.

This report explores how, and to what degree, adaptation policies and governance arrangements are beginning to acknowledge and respond to the systemic nature of climate change.

As the world warms, understanding the limits of human heat tolerance is becoming increasingly important.

Climate adaptation increasingly depends on specialized knowledge — from climate modelling and flood mapping to water management and data analysis — as well as local knowledge, developed over generations.

In the century and a half after Tambora, disasters continued to take an enormous toll. Earthquakes, cyclones, and floods claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in multiple events, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century.

A study published in Nature predicts that climate change could produce larger, more damaging hailstones in some regions. The editors of Nature have also published a Research Briefing in the same issue summarizing the work.