Last year saw yet another year of weather extremes. The Copernicus Climate Change Service run by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts on behalf of the European Commission (Copernicus, 2024) measured 2023 as being globally the warmest year since records began in 1850. This was by a large margin (0.17 per cent) over the previous record in 2016, with global surface air temperature at nearly 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. While last year’s observations embodied an El Niño effect, which every few years sees temperatures affected by warmer waters coming to the surface of the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean, changes and anomalies consistently observed over the last few years across the globe are becoming more pronounced. What is commonly labelled “climate change” is turning into a global climate emergency. No economy or society are immune to its effects. Today, we see the global average temperature at over 1.1°C above pre-industrial levels, a rise that has been extraordinarily rapid on a planetary timescale, and one that has been primarily caused through our (humans) burning fossil fuels. Nearly a decade has passed since the United Nations’ Climate Change Conference in 2015, COP21, where 196 nations adopted The Paris Agreement – a legally binding international treaty on climate change. Its goal was to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and to pursue efforts “to limit the increase to 1.5°C”.

Retaining operational effectiveness in a low-carbon world will require military innovation and change. Indeed, there has been growing acknowledgement within some defence ministries that as the world decarbonises a military energy transition is essential. In this paper, we illustrate how calls for a military energy transition have gained renewed traction within the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) since 2018. Empirically, we draw on semi-structured interviews with 46 officials and armed forces personnel, conducted by the authors between June and October 2023. To structure our analysis, we adopt a multilevel perspective (MLP) from the field of Sustainability Transitions. Combining the MLP with insights from the literature on military innovation, we shed light on the ways proponents of ‘low-carbon warfare’ have challenged the ‘high-carbon’ sociotechnical regime that currently dominates the MoD. We also explain why more rapid and disruptive change has been stymied. By centring attention on the extent of ‘alignment’ between internal and external sources of change, our MLP makes a valuable contribution to understanding why the struggle for military change often unfolds in non-linear ways.

Recent years have seen increasing calls by a few scientists, largely from the Global North, to explore “solar geoengineering,” a set of speculative technologies that would reflect parts of incoming sunlight back into space and, if deployed at planetary scale, have an average cooling effect. Numerous concerns about the development of such speculative technologies include the many ecological risks and uncertainties as well as unresolved questions of global governance and global justice. This essay starts with the premise that solar geoengineering at planetary scale is unlikely to be governable in a globally inclusive and just manner. Thus, the ethically sound approach is to pursue governance that leads to the nonuse of planetary solar geoengineering. Yet is such a prohibitory agreement feasible, in the face of possible opposition by a few powerful states and other interests? Drawing on social science research and a host of existing transnational and international governance arrangements, this essay offers three illustrative pathways through which a nonuse norm for solar geoengineering could emerge and become diffused and institutionalized in global politics: (1) civil society-led transnational approaches; (2) regionally led state and civil society hybrid approaches; and (3) like-minded or “Schengen-style” club initiatives led by states.

This essay investigates the fit between solar radiation modification (SRM) and climate politics. Researchers, activists, and politicians often present SRM technologies as “radical.” According to this frame, SRM comes into view as a last-ditch effort to avoid climate emergencies. Such a rationale may be applicable to the scientists researching the potential of SRM, yet it only partially accounts for political and policy interest in SRM. In this contribution, I argue that there is an increasingly tight fit between the promise of SRM technologies and the global regime of climate politics. Within this regime, SRM may not be a radical option but is more of a logical extension of current rationales. I argue that SRM corresponds to tightly controlled discursive rules within which climate politics operates, leading to a shifting narrative on the feasibility, desirability, and necessity of SRM. The ethical implications of this tight fit are threefold. First, it implies that SRM might be an instrument of mitigation deterrence, implicitly as much as explicitly. Second, ethical responsibility and political value debates are at risk of becoming invisible once SRM becomes embedded in the prevailing regime. Third, SRM use might become inevitable, despite the good intentions of most people involved.

This article analyses the collapse of the Mongol empire in the mid- to late fourteenth century (1330s to 1390s) across Eurasia, looking at three facets of the Crisis: environmental—focusing on climate change; epidemiological—exploring the Black Death's impact on the fall of the Chinggisids; and political—mainly the dilution of the Chinggisid charisma due to the halt of expansion. We argue that the main facet of the Crisis was political, and that it derived from the nomadic culture of the Mongols. This was the same political culture that enabled them to establish their huge empire. However, an integral part of this political culture was the need to secure the support of the nomadic elites who were also the backbone of the Mongol army. This proved to be much harder in a reality of excessive natural disasters on the one hand and the erosion of the Chinggisid charisma due to the renunciation of the ideal of world conquest on the other. The result was a growing number of elite groups who contested for power while nominally retaining the framework of the Chinggisid principle, among whom the imperial sons-in-law played a significant part, as well as the shrink and fragmentation of the Chinggisid polities that survived the Crisis.

Recent increases in seawater temperature have been predicted to induce a poleward shift in the distribution of marine organisms. This study reports the first record of the winter appearance of green turtles (Chelonia mydas) in a habitat restricted to summer and autumn in northeast Japan. One individual was observed by a diver at Tomari-hama on the Oshika Peninsula (38°21′ N, 141°31′ E) on 28 December 2023. Another individual was incidentally captured in a fixed net near Tashiro-jima on the Oshika Peninsula (38°17′ N, 141°24′ E) on 18 April 2024 with a straight carapace length of 41.5 cm and body mass of 6.4 kg. Because previous bycatch surveys show that the earliest and latest appearances of green turtles in this area occurred in late June and late November, respectively, the occurrences reported in this study were two months earlier and one month later. The sea surface temperatures at the time of these observations were 15.9 and 16.0°C, respectively, which are 3.5 and 6.6°C higher than those of normal years. The unexpected winter appearance of green turtles implies an expansion of the habitable period for this species in response to climate change, and it, therefore, is emphasizes the need for continued monitoring surveys to collect additional sightings.

Traditionally, physical education has focused on movement competency to develop skills for successful performance in different physical activities. Recently, however, the focus of many physical educators is shifting to notions of physical literacy to promote human flourishing through embodied experiences across multiple and diverse movement contexts well beyond physical education. While this shift is a welcome corrective to more traditional approaches to physical education, mainstream conceptions of physical literacy remain unduly narrow as rooted in colonial logics that continue to separate humans from the Earth while locating dominant categories of the human in hierarchical positions of power. In response, this article is an entanglement of Western and Métis embodiments of physical literacy. Deconstructing universalising models and modes of physical literacy set in dominant Western constructs, we seek to foster culturally relevant and meaningful physical literacy to promote physical activity and the wholistic health and well-being of Indigenous, or specifically, Red River Métis teachers and learners in Winnipeg, Canada. In doing so, we seek to provide a (re)visioning of human/Earth relationships as cultivated through movement-with Land; and thus, strengthen physical educational practices that more adequately attends to social (human) and ecological (Earth) flourishing in the context of global climate change.

In 2021, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) moved to integrate climate risks into its Article IV surveillance of member states. While the IMF has not traditionally been at the forefront of climate change efforts, this decision involved defining climate change as a risk to macro-economic stability. I argue that the integration of climate change into IMF surveillance can be understood as a case of international organisation (IO) boundary work taking place via the mechanism of economisation: an economic institution addressing a (traditionally non-economic) issue as an economic issue. The study identifies crucial factors shaping this boundary expansion, particularly the agency of IMF staff, as well as preferences within the IMF Executive Board, and institutional ideas. The straightforward integration of physical and transition climate risks is in contrast to the contestation surrounding the integration of mitigation policy. The findings contribute to the literature on IOs and their boundaries, change within the IMF, and the environmental political economy. The analysis reveals the role of IMF staff in this boundary work and, in addition, that institutionalised ideas and the heterogeneous preferences among member states acted as scope conditions limiting how far this economisation could go.

The transition between the Paleocene and Eocene epochs (ca. 56 Ma) was marked by a period of rapid global warming of 5 °C to 8 °C following a carbon isotope excursion (CIE) lasting 200 ky or less referred to as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). The PETM precipitated a significant shift in the composition of North American floral communities and major mammalian turnover. We explored the ecological impacts of this phenomenon by analyzing 173 mammal species from the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming, USA, including their associated body alongside a database of 30 palynofloral localities as proxies for habitat. For each time bin, we calculated mean and median differences in body mass and habitat preference between significantly aggregated and segregated mammal species. Aggregated species showed significant similarity in habitat preference only prior to the PETM, after which habitat preference ceased to be a significant factor in community assembly. Our measures of differences in body mass space provide no evidence of a significant impact of competitive interactions on community assembly across the PETM, aligning with previous work. Our results indicate the persistence of a stable mammalian functional community structure despite taxonomic turnover, climate change and broadening habitat preferences.

The semiarid northeast coast of Brazil harbours just less than 44,300 ha of mangroves, 4% of Brazilian total. Notwithstanding this relatively small area, these forests have high ecological and economic importance, sustaining traditional fisheries and protecting biodiversity, including many threatened species. They present unique biogeochemical characteristics resulting in distinct ecosystem functioning compared to mangroves located in humid areas. Semiarid mangroves present lower aboveground biomass compared to humid region mangroves but show similar belowground biomass. Whereas mangrove soils in humid areas are strongly influenced by sulphate reduction, iron geochemistry is a primary driver of soil characteristics in semiarid mangrove soils, suggesting different responses to climate change drivers between them. Although legally protected, they have incurred continuous degradation due to regional drivers, mostly aquaculture and river damming, which differs from those in humid coast mangroves. Semiarid mangroves are also particularly sensitive to drivers associated with global climate change (high temperatures, reduced rainfall and sea level rise). These conditions occur at a global scale; however, the impacts are worsened by the natural conditions of semiarid coastlines, which already provide biologically stressful conditions for mangroves. This article compares the impacts of such drivers in semiarid mangroves with those of humid mangroves, focusing on their biogeochemical response and eventual rehabilitation.