Climate Change

Meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement means embracing a sustainable transition to renewables. Yet analyses suggest that decarbonisation can only be achieved with targeted government support for the right technologies.

When it gets warmer, organisms rise higher from the lowlands. Researchers from ETH and WSL investigated what could happen to plant communities on alpine grasslands if grasshoppers from lower elevations settled there.

How do Swiss beeches respond to extreme drought? To answer this question, researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) studied 75 National Forest Inventory (NFI) sample plots during and after the dry summer of 2018. Reduced growth and an abundance of prematurely discoloured leaves and thinned crowns provided clear evidence of a loss of vitality in many of the beeches examined. However, most of the trees recovered the following year, when the weather was wetter and less hot.

Civil society and governments struggle to take action when it comes to climate change. So what’s the solution? We asked climate researcher Reto Knutti and climate strike advocate Marie-Claire Graf for their perspectives.

Coral reefs are extremely sensitive to temperature, making them particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. But some corals seem able to adapt. Researchers from EPFL and the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD) studied a reef in New Caledonia, combining approaches from environmental science and genomics to characterize their adaptive potential and develop targeted conservation strategies.