India’s proposed coal plants threaten to lock out its low-emission energy goals under the international climate accord.
Earth’s Future
Posted inResearch Spotlights
How Can We Best Manage Shared Resources?
Researchers develop a mathematical model to shed light on the social, economic, and ecological challenges of governing resources such as fisheries, forests, grazing lands, and the atmosphere.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Are Studies That Evaluate Ecosystem Services Useful?
Ecologists find flaws in the approach to research that focuses on services ecosystems provide to humans. These flaws limit certain studies’ utility.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Natural Resource Exploitation Could Reach New Depths
The deep seafloor could provide humans with supplies of valuable metals, but opinion is divided as to whether sustainable exploitation is possible and worth the ecological and economic risk.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Removing Carbon from the Ground Up
Massive plantations for storing carbon and growing biofuel won’t achieve the Paris Agreement’s “2-degree guardrail,” but they could help.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Ocean Currents Push Mainland Pollution to Remote Islands
Marine protected areas, set up to conserve marine ecosystems and species, accumulate pollutants swept in from mainland shores by ocean currents.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
A Framework for Decisions on Science and Policy
Human reasoning has helped us become one of the most successful species to populate the planet, but we still struggle with cognitive biases.
Posted inEditors' Vox
Here Comes the Anthropocene
Two recent papers in Earth's Future discuss the addition of a new epoch to the geological timescale.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Which Greenhouse Gas Does the Most Damage to Crops?
Models showed that approximately 93% of crop losses over the rest of the century could be caused by non–carbon dioxide emissions, the most damaging of these being methane.
Posted inEditors' Vox
Perspectives on Climate Tipping Points
If policy makers are to make real progress, we must start meaning the same thing when we use the same words to describe climate change.