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Opportunity cost estimates for spatial conservation prioritisation across terrestrial Europe
No full textOpportunity costs of conservation represent the foregone economic benefits from using land for nature conservation rather than alternative activities. Considering opportunity costs therefore helps in identifying cost-effective solutions in conservation prioritisation analyses. Since comprehensive, high-resolution, pan-European opportunity cost data are currently lacking, we created a 1 km European layer of opportunity costs (€/ha/yr) for arable, pastoral, forestry and urban lands. To create this layer, we estimated the opportunity costs of productive lands (agriculture and forestry) based on (sub)national land and resource rent data, which we allocated to the grid level integrating agricultural and forestry yield data with country-specific commodity prices. We estimated opportunity costs of urban land based on area-standardised residential rents and urban population density using empirical data from 42 European residential areas. Across land types, urban land comes with the highest opportunity costs, followed by arable, pastoral, and forestry land. We envisage this new opportunity cost layer to be particular useful for broad-scale European conservation prioritisation analyses
Amplified agricultural impacts from more frequent and intense sequential heat events
No full textAs the climate warms, interacting weather extremes such as sequential heat events pose complex risks to societies. Regarding global agriculture, laboratory experiments suggest that early crop exposure to heat may either confer tolerance or enhance vulnerability to subsequent heat during the critical crop flowering stage. We show that warm early-seasons improve crop yield potential, particularly for soybean and maize, but also increase the impacts of subsequent heat by 5%–55% compared to years with average early-season temperatures. The impacts of this increased yield sensitivity outweigh the benefits of early season heat when mid-season temperature anomalies exceed 0.7 ∘ C–5 ∘ C (depending on the crop). Analyzing projected temperatures under the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway 3-7.0, we find a tenfold increase in the likelihood of experiencing sequential heat in early and mid-season crop growth stages, defined as a joint 90th percentile event. Accounting for the interactive effects of early and mid-season warming increases projected temperature-related crop yield losses by 2%–44%, depending on crop and region. These results underline the emerging nonlinear risks from sequential heat extremes to food systems, which can largely be avoided when limiting warming to 1.5 ∘ C globally
A near-real time daily European Power Consumption and Carbon Intensity Dataset (ECON-PowerCI)
No full textWe present a near-real-time daily European Consumption-based Power Carbon Intensity Dataset (ECON-PowerCI), developed from the CarbonMonitor power production dataset for Europe. Spanning from January 2015 to December 2024, the dataset encompasses 35 European countries, with daily updates and a one-day latency. ECON-PowerCI provides consumption-based power carbon intensity at the national level, accounting for cross-border electricity net imports in the country of consumption. By integrating ENTSO-E (The European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity) data, ECON-PowerCI enables comprehensive analysis of carbon intensity trends shaped by cross-border transmissions, extreme weather events, and disruptions like the COVID-19 pandemic and geopolitical conflicts. This dataset facilitates in-depth study of the effect of cross-border electricity flows on national carbon footprints, providing insights for energy policy and climate resilience. The dataset also holds extensive research potential for power-related analyses and policy-making in Europe’s interconnected power systems
Operationalizing Maladaptation: A Conceptual and Analytical Framework for Advancing Resilience Theory in Climate Adaptation
No full textConversion from coniferous to broadleaved trees can make European forests more climate-effective
No full textThe climate effectiveness of forestation in Europe is debated, as it may provide more warming via solar energy absorption than evaporative cooling. Since forests play an important role in European climate policy, it is necessary to explore potential solutions to this issue in a warmer world. Here, based on experiments conducted with a regional climate model under several forest change scenarios, we find that conversion from coniferous to broadleaved trees in currently forested areas can provide cooling for summer hot extremes (e.g., reducing the monthly mean daily maximum temperature in July over Continental Europe by 0.6 °C). The conversion can also mitigate the undesired warming impacts of forestation with present-day forest composition in most of Europe, e.g., reversing effects on the monthly mean daily maximum temperature in July over Continental Europe from +0.3 °C to −0.7 °C. This study highlights the importance of considering tree species in European forest policy development and suggests that the Northern and Central regions should be prioritised for forestation over the Western and Southern parts
Driving Change- harnessing the power of data and innovation in the age of information Security
No full textDoubling of the global freshwater footprint of material production over two decades
No full textProducing essential, widely used materials such as steel, cement, paper, plastics and rubber requires substantial freshwater resources, which may exacerbate water scarcity. Despite this, comprehensive research on freshwater embodied in material production remains limited. Here we assess the blue water footprint (WFblue) of 16 metallic and non-metallic material categories across 164 regions, using a multiregional input–output model and the hypothetical extraction method. Our findings indicate that the global WFblue of material production doubled from 25.1 billion m3 in 1995 to 50.7 billion m3 in 2021, raising its share in global blue water consumption from 2.8% to 4.7%. The East, South Asia and Oceania regions saw an alarming 267% surge in WFblue for material production, with China—already facing medium-high water stress—experiencing a dramatic ~400% increase. As material production is expected to grow, we underscore the urgency of a water–materials nexus approach, particularly in water-stressed countries
Global carbon storage in harvested wood products: a forest sector model inter-comparison
No full textForests can contribute to climate mitigation through the use of harvested wood products (HWPs), which provide a significant long-term source of carbon sequestration, replacement of more emissions-intensive building materials, and the integration of forest biomass into bioenergy systems. However, knowledge gaps remain regarding the interplay between HWP carbon flows, traditional forest product market developments, and climate policy developments incentivizing bioenergy and carbon sequestration in forestry at global scales. Information on the extent to which future policy and market developments can impact global carbon fluxes in wood product pools is needed for guiding policy design and quantifying longer-term tradeoffs between carbon stock preservation in forests and increased carbon sequestration in wood products. This study builds on projections from a forest model inter-comparison analysis of three global forest sector models to estimate the potential carbon pool in HWPs across various socioeconomic scenarios and levels of greenhouse gas (GHG) policy ambition. Further, we assess the extent to which the use of bioenergy, paired with carbon capture and storage, can enhance this forest carbon sink. In scenarios with higher levels of global timber production, even in scenarios with fossil-fueled economic growth, we see an increase in carbon stored in wood products used for housing materials, lumber, pulp, and paper products. However, climate policy stringency reduces the HWP sink, shifting C sequestration to forests and allocating harvests to bioenergy systems. The use of carbon capture and storage substantially increases the global HWP carbon sink. The results of this study highlight how economic and policy factors could impact the role of global forests in climate mitigation through carbon storage in long-lived wood products and bioenergy carbon capture and storage pools, providing new insight to policy-makers, forest managers, and forest product manufacturers on viable pathways to support the co-production of timber and carbon sinks
Reply to Comment on ‘Extreme weather events in early summer 2018 connected by a recurrent hemispheric wave-7 pattern’
No full textCircumglobal teleconnections from wave-like patterns in the mid-latitude jets can lead to synchronized weather extremes in the mid-latitudes of Northern and Southern hemispheres. The simultaneous occurrence of record breaking and persistent northern hemisphere temperature anomalies in Summer 2018 were previously discussed in the context of a persistent zonally elongated wave-7 pattern that stretched over large parts of the northern hemisphere over an extended time and let to considerable societal impacts. Various diagnostics have been put forward to quantify and detect such wave patterns, many of which incorporate low-pass time filtering to separate signal from noise. In this response we argue that advancing our understanding of the large-scale circulation’s response to anthropogenic climate change and reducing associated uncertainties in future climate risk requires a diverse range of perspectives and diagnostics from both the climate and weather research communities
