Environmental health articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    By 2050 > 23% of the global population aged 69 + will live in climates with acute heat exposure– the 95th percentile of the distribution of maximum daily temperatures–greater than the critical threshold of 37.5C, compared with 14% in 2020, an increase of 177–246 million older adults exposed to dangerous acute heat.

    • Giacomo Falchetta
    • , Enrica De Cian
    •  & Deborah Carr

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Flooding impacts billions globally and indirect health effects are not sufficiently examined, especially for women in developing countries. Here, the authors show that flood exposure during pregnancy correlates with a higher risk of pregnancy loss, particularly for marginalized women, revealing increased health disparities in a changing climate.

    • Cheng He
    • , Yixiang Zhu
    •  & Haidong Kan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The geographic distribution of dengue has been expanding in recent decades, and Vietnam is one of the most severely affected countries. In this study, the authors use Bayesian hierarchical modelling to investigate the socio-environmental and climatic drivers of dengue incidence in Vietnam and how they vary across the country.

    • Rory Gibb
    • , Felipe J. Colón-González
    •  & Rachel Lowe

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ronco and colleagues analyze disaster-induced movements in the presence of floods, storms, and landslides during 2016–2021, providing empirical evidence that differential vulnerability exists and quantifying its extent. They achieve this by employing explainable machine learning techniques to model and understand internal displacement flows and patterns from observational data.

    • Michele Ronco
    • , José María Tárraga
    •  & Gustau Camps-Valls

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors identify four main types of vertical structures of marine heatwaves, with different impact depths and spatio-temporal distributions, that are influenced by multiscale ocean dynamical processes.

    • Ying Zhang
    • , Yan Du
    •  & Alistair J. Hobday

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Estimating health burden of air pollution against the background of population aging is of significance for achieving Sustainable Development Goal 3.9. Here, the authors show that population aging is expected to be the leading contributor to increased deaths attributable to PM2.5 in China by 2035, which will counter the positive gains achieved by improvements in air pollution and healthcare.

    • Fangjin Xu
    • , Qingxu Huang
    •  & Brett A. Bryan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The risk of heat-mortality is increasing sharply. The authors report that heat-mortality levels of a 1-in-100-year summer in the climate of 2000 can be expected once every ten to twenty years in the current climate and at least once in five years with 2 °C of global warming.

    • Samuel Lüthi
    • , Christopher Fairless
    •  & Ana M. Vicedo-Cabrera

  • Review Article
    | Open Access

    Zooplankton are a critical link to higher trophic levels and play an important role in global biogeochemical cycles. This Review examines key responses of zooplankton to ocean warming, highlights key knowledge and geographic gaps that need to be addressed, and discusses how better use of observations and long-term zooplankton monitoring programmes can help fill these gaps.

    • Lavenia Ratnarajah
    • , Rana Abu-Alhaija
    •  & Lidia Yebra

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Injury poses heavy burden on public health, but little evidence on the potential role of climate change on injury exists. Here, the authors collect data during 2013-2019 in six provinces of China to estimate the associations between temperature and injury mortality, and to project future mortality burden attributable to temperature change driven by climate change.

    • Jianxiong Hu
    • , Guanhao He
    •  & Wenjun Ma

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Solar geoengineering, an emergency climate intervention, could shift one billion people back into areas of malaria risk. Regional tradeoffs and potential adverse outcomes point to the need for health sector planning with Global South leadership.

    • Colin J. Carlson
    • , Rita Colwell
    •  & Christopher H. Trisos

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The degree to which Arctic sea ice decline influences the mid-latitude atmospheric circulation is widely debated. Here, the authors use a coordinated multi-model experiment to show that Arctic sea ice loss causes a weakening of the mid-latitude westerly winds, but the effect is overall small.

    • D. M. Smith
    • , R. Eade
    •  & A. Walsh

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A new study shows that tropical silvopasture systems can provide significant cooling services for local communities, and identifies where these silvopasture systems can most effectively counteract global climate change to help communities adapt to warming.

    • Lucas R. Vargas Zeppetello
    • , Susan C. Cook-Patton
    •  & Yuta J. Masuda

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Heatwaves are becoming increasingly frequent and more intense, causing severe economic impacts through reduced labour productivity. Here, the authors show that economic damages in Europe exceed 1% of the GDP in vulnerable areas, which might increase by a factor of almost five in the medium term without climate action.

    • David García-León
    • , Ana Casanueva
    •  & Lars Nybo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Root-mycorrhizal interactions could help explain the heterogeneity of plant responses to CO2 fertilisation and nutrient availability. Here the authors combine tree-ring and metagenomic data to reveal that tree growth responses to increasing CO2 along a soil nutrient gradient depend on the nitrogen foraging traits of ectomycorrhizal fungi.

    • Peter T. Pellitier
    • , Inés Ibáñez
    •  & Kirk Acharya

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How acute deoxygenation events affect tropical marine ecosystems remains poorly understood. This study integrates analyses of coral reef benthic communities with microbial community sequencing to show how a deoxygenation event rapidly altered a shallow tropical coral reef ecosystem in the Caribbean.

    • Maggie D. Johnson
    • , Jarrod J. Scott
    •  & Andrew H. Altieri

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Open fires can increase heavy exposure to hazardous particulate matters, and thus harm human health, particularly among the vulnerable individuals, such as pregnant women. Here, the authors show an association between maternal exposure to fire smoke and increased risk of pregnancy loss in South Asia.

    • Tao Xue
    • , Guannan Geng
    •  & Tong Zhu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Individual exposure to heat is associated with adverse health and economic outcomes. Here, the authors show that people of color and people living in poverty bear a disproportionate burden of urban heat exposure in almost all major cities in the continental United States.

    • Angel Hsu
    • , Glenn Sheriff
    •  & Diego Manya

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Understanding how cities respond to extreme weather is critical; as such events are becoming more frequent. Using anonymized mobile phone data for Houston, Texas during Hurricane Harvey in 2017, the authors find that mobility behavior exposes neighborhood disparities in resilience capacity and recovery.

    • Boyeong Hong
    • , Bartosz J. Bonczak
    •  & Constantine E. Kontokosta

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Global warming is expected to increase mortality due to heat stress in many regions. Here, the authors asses how mortality due to high temperatures changes in China changes for different demographic groups and show that heat-related excess mortality is increasing under climate change, a process that is strongly amplified by population ageing.

    • Jun Yang
    • , Maigeng Zhou
    •  & Qiyong Liu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The impacts of climate change on agricultural productivity remain debated. Here, the authors present new evidence for the magnitude and causes of U.S. crop insurance losses, using a database of production risk from 1989–2014 across 1733 counties for corn and 1632 counties for soybeans, and find that crop production risk will increase in response to warmer temperatures.

    • Edward D. Perry
    • , Jisang Yu
    •  & Jesse Tack

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Prior studies mapping climatologically suitable areas for malaria transmission have used relatively simple thresholds for precipitation. Here the authors show that when models incorporate hydrological processes a more complex pattern of malaria suitability emerges in Africa and future shifts in suitability are more pronounced.

    • M. W. Smith
    • , T. Willis
    •  & C. J. Thomas

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Drylands cover nearly half of Earth’s surface, yet how they will fare in light of anthropogenic climate change is debated. Here the authors find that over the past 40 years climate change has pushed ~13% of drylands towards desertification threatening hundreds of millions of people in developing nations.

    • A. L. Burrell
    • , J. P. Evans
    •  & M. G. De Kauwe

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Climate affects dynamics of infectious diseases, but the impact on respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) epidemiology isn’t well understood. Here, Baker et al. model the influence of temperature, humidity and rainfall on RSV epidemiology in the USA and Mexico and predict impact of climate change on RSV dynamics.

    • Rachel E. Baker
    • , Ayesha S. Mahmud
    •  & Bryan T. Grenfell

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Minimum mortality temperature (MMT) changes geographically and over time. Here, by analysing MMTs in 420 global locations during 1984-2018, the authors found that MMT is very close to the local most frequent temperature (MFT) in the same period, and the association between MFT and MMT is not changed when adjusted for lattitude and study year.

    • Qian Yin
    • , Jinfeng Wang
    •  & Yuming Guo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Heatwaves are expected to increase under climate change, and so are the associated deaths. Here the authors determine the regional high temperature thresholds for 27 metropolises in China and analyze the changes to heat-related mortality, showing that the additional global-warming temperature increase of 0.5°C, from 1.5°C to 2.0°C, will lead to tens of thousands of additional deaths, annually.

    • Yanjun Wang
    • , Anqian Wang
    •  & Thomas Fischer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Climate change strongly impacts regions in high latitudes and altitudes that store high amounts of carbon in yet frozen ground. Here the authors show that the consequence of these changes is global warming of permafrost at depths greater than 10 m in the Northern Hemisphere, in mountains, and in Antarctica.

    • Boris K. Biskaborn
    • , Sharon L. Smith
    •  & Hugues Lantuit

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Irrigation increases the intensity of heatwaves over the North China Plain but how this will be exacerbated by climate change has not been quantified. Here the authors show that irrigation enhances magnitude of extreme wet-bulb temperature and intensity of heatwaves in this region.

    • Suchul Kang
    •  & Elfatih A. B. Eltahir

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Arctic ecosystems are at threat due to the rapid nature of climate change and Arctic amplification. Here, the authors show that the watershed of Lake Hazen, the Arctic’s largest lake by volume, has undergone dramatic changes in response to as little as a ~1°C increase in summer air temperatures.

    • Igor Lehnherr
    • , Vincent L. St. Louis
    •  & Charles H. Talbot

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Phenotypic plasticity—the ability to express multiple phenotypes from the same genome—is a widespread adaptation to environmental variability. Here, Oostra et al analyze transcriptomes of an African butterfly with distinct seasonal phenotypes, and observe lack of variation for plasticity, limiting potential for evolutionary responses to climate change.

    • Vicencio Oostra
    • , Marjo Saastamoinen
    •  & Christopher W. Wheat

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Aerosol pollution from shipping contributes to cooling but also leads to premature mortality and morbidity. Here the authors combine emission inventories, atmospheric models and health risk functions to show how cleaner marine fuels will reduce premature deaths and childhood asthma but results in larger warming.

    • Mikhail Sofiev
    • , James J. Winebrake
    •  & James J. Corbett

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Modulation of ambient PM2.5 exposure and premature mortality burden in India under climate change scenarios is unclear. Here the authors show that the premature mortality burden is projected to decrease in 2100 relative to present day under all possible combined climate change and socioeconomic pathways scenarios.

    • Sourangsu Chowdhury
    • , Sagnik Dey
    •  & Kirk R. Smith

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The impact of climate change on phosphorus (P) loss from land to water is unclear. Here, the authors use P flux data, climate simulations and P transfer models to show that only large scale agricultural change will limit the effect of climate change on average winter P loads in three catchments across the UK.

    • M. C. Ockenden
    • , M. J. Hollaway
    •  & P. M. Haygarth

  • Article
    | Open Access

    ENSO end members El Niño and La Niña are linked to elevated coastal hazards across the Pacific region. Here, the authors show that the wave conditions and coastal response for the 2015–16 El Niño indicate that it was one of the most significant events of the last 145 years.

    • Patrick L. Barnard
    • , Daniel Hoover
    •  & Katherine A. Serafin

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