Natural climate solutions.The way forward

Climate change is a global challenge that threatens global ecological security and sustainable development.Find-ing ways to mitigate their impacts is paramount through engineering carbon storage,low-carbon energy tran-sition,or natural climate solutions(NCS).NCS involve a set of measures(e.g.,afforestation,land restoration,biochar reuse or sustainable land use practices).Implementing NCS increases carbon sequestration and mitigates climate change at the lowest costs and greenest ways.In addition,NCS practices can improve multiple ecosystem services(ES)such as air quality,flood and erosion regulation,pest control,water purification,wild food biomass,recreation or landscape aesthetics.However,unsustainable implementation of NCS,such as over-afforestation of dense mono-forest,can lead to tradeoffs with water supply,wildfire risk,and decreased grasslands and crop-lands.Therefore,to optimise the NCS implementation,reducing the tradeoffs associated and transforming the“expand ecosystem area”to“improve ecosystem management efficiency”is vital.Although NCS can contribute significantly to mitigating climate change,systematic climate actions must be accompanied by a transformation in the global society and investment in new technologies.This will be key to addressing global challenges such as the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs),such as SDG 13(Climate Action),SDG 15(Life on Land),SDG 2(Zero Hunger),SDG 3(Good Health and Wellbeing),SDG 6(Clean Water and Sanitation),and SDG 14(Life Bellow Water).

Investigating the Effect of Climatic Factors of Roshtkhar Town (Khorasan Razavi, Iran) on the Development and Cultivation of Pistachio Using GIS Software

The use of Geographic Information System (GIS) has significantly helped managers provide optimal models of sustainable agricultural development, identify local features related to agricultural production and their proper zoning, identify agricultural needs and constraints and finally provide the appropriate structure of land use. The main purpose of this study was to determine areas capable of cultivating Pistachio according to the parameters affecting the Pistachio cultivation in Roshtkhar town. Statistics of meteorological stations of the town were taken from Meteorology Organization of Khorasan Razavi for the period of 1989-2010 in order to determine climatic parameters required to cultivate Pistachio. For mapping surface elevation, slope, aspect, and TIN of the geographic organization of armed forces with a scale of 1:250,000 topographic maps were used. For mapping vegetation and land use in the area under study, land capability map of the area on a scale of 1:250,000 from the institute of soil and water was used. Also information on cultivation and annual production of agricultural statistics, published by Agriculture was used. Finally, it was concluded that the northeast and southwest of Roshtkhar town are the most prone areas to cultivate Pistachio.

Could CMIP6 climate models reproduce the early-2000s global warming slowdown?

The unexpected global warming slowdown during 1998–2013 challenges the existing scientific understanding of global temperature change mechanisms,and thus the simulation and prediction ability of state-of-the-art climate models since most models participating in phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project(CMIP5)cannot simulate it.Here,we examine whether the new-generation climate models in CMIP6 can reproduce the recent global warming slowdown,and further evaluate their capacities for simulating key-scale natural variabilities which are the most likely causes of the slowdown.The results show that although the CMIP6 models present some encouraging improvements when compared with CMIP5,most of them still fail to reproduce the warming slowdown.They considerably overestimate the warming rate observed in 1998–2013,exhibiting an obvious warming acceleration rather than the observed deceleration.This is probably associated with their deficiencies in simulating the distinct temperature change signals from the human-induced long-term warming trend and/or the three crucial natural variabilities at interannual,interdecadal,and multidecadal scales.In contrast,the 4 models that can successfully reproduce the slowdown show relatively high skills in simulating the long-term warming trend and the three keyscale natural variabilities.Our work may provide important insight for the simulation and prediction of near-term climate changes.