Droughts are having a major impact on Europe’s forests — and climate change could make them even more frequent. But diversity helps: a new study led by the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and Leipzig University shows that forests are more resistant to drought when trees employ different strategies for using water. The decisive factor is not only how many species are present, but how differently they absorb, store, and use water.

In the summer of 2022, 20 islands in the Maldives were flooded when a distant swell event in the Indian Ocean coincided with an extremely high tide level. Now researchers from the University of Plymouth (UK) and Deltares, a not-for-profit applied research institute in the Netherlands, have warned that future predicted rises in sea levels - coupled with an increase in extreme weather events and wave conditions - could result in such flooding becoming far more common, perhaps happening every two to three years by around 2050.

Climate change and the associated rising temperatures are melting more and more frozen ground in the Arctic. This dissolved matter contains large amounts of organic carbon which is flowing into the central Arctic ocean. In a new study, scientists led by Alfred-Wegener-Institute quantified how much terrestrial organic matter accumulates in the central Arctic Ocean. Using chemical fingerprints, they were able to assess how fast it degrades, thus releasing additional CO₂ to the ocean. These findings are an important basis to project how inputs from land affect Arctic marine ecosystems and the ability of the ocean to store CO₂ in a warming climate. The results are published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

As climate change increases the frequency of droughts, UCLA and UC Davis researchers found that people report more conflicts with wildlife during drought, when resources are scarce.