climate change

Extreme wildfires are becoming more frequent and causing greater environmental and social impact. Current policies that prioritise fire suppression have not only failed to prevent this situation from arising, but  actually made it worse. The report Changing Wildfires - Policy Options for a Fire-literate and Fire-adapted Europe,  released by the European Academies' Science Advisory Council (EASAC), addresses this issue by outlining eight policy options. The report's key recommendations focus on  putting landscape management first —by regulating biomass structure and land use — and empowering local communities.

Forests cover approximately 40% of Europe's land area. Between 1990 and 2022, they absorbed around 10% of the continent's emissions from human activity, but this process is slowing down. An international team, including CREAF and CSIC, analyzes this decline and its causes in an article and proposes possible solutions. The work is published in the journal Nature.  

The concrete used by the Roman Empire was used to build aqueducts, bridges and buildings that have lasted for over two thousand years. A study analyses whether returning to this ancient material would help to decarbonise modern cement. According to the authors, reproducing the recipe would require a similar amount of energy and water, with similar CO2 emissions; however, its durability could make it a more sustainable option. It is published in the Cell Press journal iScience.

Today at 3:00 PM CEST, the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the principal judicial body of the United Nations, will issue its advisory opinion on the obligations of states in relation to climate change and the legal consequences of those obligations. The case stems from a Pacific youth initiative, taken up by the small island nation of Vanuatu, which led a coalition of 132 countries to request an opinion. It is expected to determine whether large, polluting countries should be held accountable for damages caused to small island nations.

The last few weeks have been marked by devastating fires in Spain and other European countries. In Catalonia, just days after a fire killed two people and burned 5,500 hectares in the province of Lleida, another fire broke out in the province of Tarragona, affecting more than 3,200 hectares and now stabilised, which resulted in another person's death. What are the characteristics of these large fires? How can we prevent them? The Science Media Centre Spain organised an informative meeting with two experts to answer these questions and clarify key concepts.

The carbon available for emission without exceeding the 1.5°C limit set in the Paris Agreement—known as the carbon budget—could be exhausted in just over three years at the current rate of CO₂ emissions. This is one of the conclusions of a new edition of Indicators of Global Climate Change, published in the journal Earth System Science Data. The study also shows that between 2019 and 2024, sea levels rose by an average of around 26 millimetres: more than double the rate of 1.8 mm per year recorded since the beginning of the 20th century.

Over the last seven decades, the frequency of planetary wave resonance phenomena has tripled, according to a study published in PNAS. The authors argue that the risk of extreme weather events related to this phenomenon during the northern hemisphere summer could be higher than current model estimates.

The changes caused by the climate crisis—such as its impact on rainfall and rising temperatures—are stressful for plants in both wild and agricultural environments. A special issue of the journal Science brings together five articles reviewing this issue, including the adaptations that plants can adopt and that could be applied to combat it.

Atmospheric evaporative demand is a measure of the atmosphere's ability to extract moisture from the soil and influences the availability of water on the Earth's surface. An international team has analysed global drought data from 1901 to 2022 and found that this demand has contributed to a 40% increase in drought severity since 1981. Furthermore, this trend is accelerating and will most likely continue due to climate change, according to the authors. The results are published in the journal Nature.

An international research project involving Spanish participation has analysed the distribution of brown bears in Europe and Turkey. To do this, the team studied more than three million locations belonging to some 3,000 bears, with data from 14 European and Turkish subpopulations in very different environments. The main conclusion is that bears occupy areas where the species that form part of their diet are distributed. The study, published in Global Change Biology, shows that the influence of climate change on these species also has an impact on the distribution of bears.