Reviews & Analysis

To mark the tenth anniversary of the Paris Agreement, Nature Climate Change asked experts to reflect on the progress of and barriers to several of its key Articles. They share their thoughts on important policy implications, what has been achieved and missed, as well as future directions.

Human greenhouse gas emissions are raising temperatures and sea levels, collapsing ice sheets and acidifying oceans. Now, research maps out the range of emissions pathways that can limit these changes.

Antarctic ice shelves affect the mass loss of the Antarctic ice sheet and are vulnerable to damage from crevasses and rifts. Decades of satellite observations link this damage to past thinning and retreat of ice shelves. Damage is projected to intensify under future high-emission climate scenarios, further weakening ice shelves and accelerating ice loss.

Climate change influences not only crop yields but also crop nutritional content, which is currently not simulated by process-based crop models. This Perspective proposes a way forward to integrate nutrients into crop models to assess climate impacts and highlights data needs.

A human-driven increase in upwelling of carbon-rich deep waters threatens the efficiency of the Southern Ocean carbon sink, which substantially mitigates global warming. Long-term observations reveal that surface freshening since the 1990s has acted as a barrier, preventing CO₂ release to the atmosphere and, temporarily, preserving the Southern Ocean’s role in slowing down climate change.

Marine diatoms, tiny algae that underpin ocean food webs, face rising ocean temperatures. Now, a study shows that genome duplication helps diatoms adapt faster to warming, reshaping our understanding of phytoplankton resilience in a changing ocean.

Bridging traditional disciplinary silos, a study has mapped cascading climate risks to the European Union through stakeholder-co-produced impact chains and network analysis. It provides country-specific risk profiles by identifying critical intervention points — such as water, livelihoods or violent conflict — to support policy coherence in addressing interconnected vulnerabilities and guiding targeted adaptation.

The impacts of permafrost thaw are widespread across tundra landscapes. Now, research across a series of thermokarst landscapes on the Tibetan Plateau shows that abrupt permafrost thaw increases plant-available phosphorus, alters the vegetation community and tips the balance of belowground nutrient competition.

Scenarios, generated by integrated assessment models in model intercomparison projects (MIPs), play a central role in climate decision-making. This Perspective discusses the challenges of the current approach and proposes a new MIP platform with a transparent and inclusive process.

Glacier microclimates can decouple glacier temperatures from ongoing climatic warming, slowing down melting. However, these microclimates will decay as glaciers retreat. A statistical model indicates that by the latter half of the twenty-first century, the temperature of glaciers will be increasingly sensitive to fluctuations in atmospheric temperature.

The rise of generative AI presents both risks and opportunities for shaping climate discourse. New findings suggest it can help lower climate scepticism and bolster support for climate action.

Across five coastal regions over a four-year period, nearly 300,000 businesses invested a total of €8.7 billion in climate adaptation. An econometric analysis of these data shows that this private sector investment in adaptation modestly boosts regional economic performance, although the extent of the boost varies across sectors and geographies.

Home to roughly a quarter of the world’s population, South Asia is a hotspot for global warming impacts. In this Viewpoint, nine researchers from South Asia discuss the progress made in understanding and responding to climate change in the region.

Reducing the wildfire risk of electric grids requires assessing and comparing various adaptation measures. A study shows that a grid technology innovation cuts the risk more cost-effectively than conventional approaches such as burying power lines.

Future exposure to coastal flooding in China is driven more by growing populations and economic activity rather than by rising seas and intensifying storm surges. Policymakers must anticipate these multiple risk drivers to better inform spatial planning and development strategies and to ensure effective, sustainable coastal adaptation.

Wildland fires in snow-dominated regions such as the Arctic can have profound effects on snowpack characteristics. Satellite observations reveal a delay in snow cover formation in the Arctic following major wildland fires. Machine learning and causal analyses suggest that this delay is linked to fire-induced reductions in albedo and increases in surface temperature.

Natural disturbances, such as windthrows, pest outbreaks and wildfires, pose a major economic threat for the forestry sector. By coupling spatially explicit ecological and economic forest models, this study assesses the costs of natural disturbances under current and future climate conditions for all of Europe.

Sea-level rise poses a substantial risk to coastal communities and economies, thus accurate predictions are needed to enable planning and adaptation. This Perspective provides an overview of uncertainties in model projections of sea-level rise, and how observations can be used to reduce these.

Many of us have experienced heatwaves and survived unscathed — or so we thought. Research now shows that exposure to heatwaves affects the rate at which we age.

Elevated atmospheric CO₂ has stimulated plant growth, yet the future land carbon sink may be constrained in part by nutrient availability. Here the authors review plant nutrient acquisition strategies and the need for better representation in models to improve predictions of land carbon uptake.