How can event attribution science underpin financial decisions on Loss and Damage?

With climate extremes hitting nations across the globe, disproportionately burdening vulnerable developing countries, the prompt operation of the Loss and Damage fund is of paramount importance. As decisions on resource disbursement at the international level, and investment strategies at the national level, loom, the climate science community's role in providing fair and effective evidence is crucial. Attribution science can provide useful information for decision makers, but both ethical implications and deep uncertainty cannot be ignored.

The role of internal variability and external forcing on southwestern Australian rainfall: prospects for very wet or dry years.

The cool-season (May to October) rainfall decline in southwestern Australia deepened during 2001-2020 to become 20.5% less than the 1901-1960 reference period average, with a complete absence of very wet years (i.e.

The relative value of sociocultural and infrastructural adaptations to heat in a very hot climate in northern Australia: a case time series of heat-associated mortality.

Background: Climate change is increasing heat-associated mortality particularly in hotter parts of the world. The Northern Territory is a large and sparsely populated peri-equatorial state in Australia. The Northern Territory has the highest proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia (31%), most of whom live in remote communities of over 65 Aboriginal Nations defined by ancient social, cultural, and linguistic heritage.

Influence of the 2015-2016 El Niño on the record-breaking mangrove dieback along northern Australia coast.

This study investigates the underlying climate processes behind the largest recorded mangrove dieback event along the Gulf of Carpentaria coast in northern Australia in late 2015. Using satellite-derived fractional canopy cover (FCC), variation of the mangrove canopies during recent decades are studied, including a severe dieback during 2015-2016. The relationship between mangrove FCC and climate conditions is examined with a focus on the possible role of the 2015-2016 El Niño in altering favorable conditions sustaining the mangroves.

Publisher Correction: Continuation of tropical Pacific Ocean temperature trend may weaken extreme El Niño and its linkage to the Southern Annular Mode.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Continuation of tropical Pacific Ocean temperature trend may weaken extreme El Niño and its linkage to the Southern Annular Mode.

Observational records show that occurrences of the negative polarity of the Southern Annular Mode (low SAM) is significantly linked to El Niño during austral spring and summer, potentially providing long-lead predictability of the SAM and its associated surface climate conditions. In this study, we explore how this linkage may change under a scenario of a continuation of the ocean temperature trends that have been observed over the past 60 years, which are plausibly forced by increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. We generated coupled model seasonal forecasts for three recent extreme El Niño events by initialising the forecasts with observed ocean anomalies of 1 September 1982, 1997 and 2015 added into (1) the current ocean mean state and into (2) the ocean mean state updated to include double the recent ocean temperature trends.