In a Policy Forum, David Victor and colleagues outline a framework for incentivizing meaningful investments into high-risk, transformative clean technologies in the aviation industry. While massive reductions in global emissions are needed to combat climate change, most current clean investments focus on low-risk, mature technologies such as renewable energy, batteries, and electric vehicles. However, many sectors, including aviation, which accounts for about 3% of global emissions, face steep technological and economic barriers to decarbonization, making formative solutions risky and unattractive to investors. These industries are also highly competitive, leaving little room for bold, costly experimentation. According to Victor et al., building a low-carbon aviation industry requires tackling two core issues: the lack of breakthrough clean technologies and weak incentives for investors to take risks on them. In a competitive, capital-intensive sector, the authors note that few will innovate without stronger support and rewards for risk-taking. Although vast sums of money flow into aviation each year, almost none is directed toward sustainability, as investors favor low-risk, high-return projects. To address this, the authors propose an “aviation sustainability index” (ASI), which assigns measurable scores to projects, like adopting efficient aircraft or sustainable fuels, based on their emissions impact. This could help guide investment decisions by providing a credible framework linking financial rewards to verified climate benefits. This could allow investors to distinguish genuine progress from greenwashing and steer capital toward high-impact projects. “In many respects, the challenges in this sector are shared across other “hard to abate” sectors such as ship- ping, heavy freight, steel, and others,” write Victor et al. “All face the common challenge that there are many ideas for new technologies and business models, but none gets sufficient traction because investors don’t know which vision is most credible; there are few rewards for taking bigger risks.”

Although many ecosystems can weather several years of moderate drought, consecutive years of extreme dryness push them past a tipping point, resulting in dramatic declines in plant growth, researchers report. The findings – borne from a global experiment spanning six continents – reveal threats to Earth’s grasslands and shrublands as climate extremes intensify. Although most droughts are brief and moderate, the most ecologically and economically damaging events are both prolonged and extreme. Evidence suggests such extreme events are becoming more frequent with ongoing climate change. However, the effects of multi-year droughts on ecosystems remain poorly understood. While some studies show cumulative declines in ecosystem functioning over time, others suggest that ecosystems can acclimate, stabilizing their productivity despite prolonged stress.

 

Here, Timothy Ohlert and colleagues present findings from the International Drought Experiment (IDE), a coordinated multi-year rainfall-exclusion experiment assessing the effects of drought duration and severity on ecosystem productivity in 74 grassland and shrubland ecosystems across six continents. Ohlert et al. found that many ecosystems generally maintained productivity under moderate or less severe, multi-year droughts; although productivity dropped sharply in the first year of drought, they did not continue to decline in subsequent years, indicating ecosystem acclimation rather than cumulative loss. However, extreme droughts (e.g., 1-in-100 year events) resulted in steep and progressively larger declines in productivity as duration increased. The severity of the current year’s drought was the strongest predictor of productivity decline, yet by years three and four, extreme droughts intensified this negative effect. Sites subjected to consecutive extreme drought years experienced the most dramatic impacts, with productivity falling roughly 2.5 times – from 29% in year one to 77% by year four. According to the authors, these cumulative declines are likely due to species mortality, failed establishment, and changes in community composition. “The discovery that the resistance to drought duration of grasslands and shrublands rapidly eroded with prolonged drought of extreme intensity portends an uncertain future for these ecosystems,” Ohlert et al. write, “threatening their long-term stability and the ecosystem goods and services they provide.”

Large changes in global sea level, fueled by fluctuations in ice sheet growth and decay, occurred throughout the last ice age, rather than just toward the end of that period. 

 

The findings represent a significant change in researchers’ understanding of how the Pleistocene – the geological period from about 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago and commonly known as the last ice age – developed.

Kyoto, Japan -- Global climate action based on the Paris Agreement is progressing, but concerns have been raised that the future projections and scenarios forming the scientific basis for these actions are biased toward a limited number of regions and research institutions.

Climate research teams have created long-term climate mitigation scenarios known as integrated assessment models, which map the technological feasibility of climate change countermeasures, their associated costs, and their long-term effects. Many of these are model comparison projects, a method in which research teams from multiple countries and institutions conduct model simulations based on similar experimental settings and compare the results.

However, only a limited number of research teams can participate in these projects, and the inevitable result is that they do not adequately reflect diverse global perspectives, in particular those of developing countries.