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A key determinant and outcome of successful environmental education is ‘pro-environmental behavior’, i.e., behavior that involves conscious action to mitigate adverse environmental impacts at personal or community level, e.g., reducing resource consumption and waste generation, avoiding toxic substances, and organizing community awareness initiatives. However, some theorists have sought to move away from rationalist models of behavioral modification, towards holistic pedagogical initiatives that seek to develop action competence. In light of the global push towards achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), emerging evidence suggests that education initiatives should foster action competence so students may be equipped to contribute to sustainable development as part of their education. The UNESCO Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) Roadmap 2030 has also identified key priority areas to strengthen ESD in formal curricula. This article reports two informal environmental education initiatives for promoting action competence and pro-environmental behaviors in school-aged children. The authors recommend that formal education settings (e.g., schools) should incorporate self-directed, free-choice project-based learning to augment environmental education programs and promote students’ action competence for contribution to attainment of SDGs. To this end, we propose a Free-Choice Project-based Learning for Action Competence in Sustainable Development (ACiSD) Curriculum, comprising six implementation dimensions, namely: (1) project duration and teaming arrangements, (2) topic selection, (3) student support, (4) teacher support, (5) learning environments, and (6) digital access and equity. For each implementation dimension, we recommend action steps to help educators implement this curriculum in their own educational settings, with the aid of an illustrative worked example.

Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interventions’ effectiveness was small, largely limited to nonclimate skeptics, and differed across outcomes: Beliefs were strengthened mostly by decreasing psychological distance (by 2.3%), policy support by writing a letter to a future-generation member (2.6%), information sharing by negative emotion induction (12.1%), and no intervention increased the more effortful behavior—several interventions even reduced tree planting. Last, the effects of each intervention differed depending on people’s initial climate beliefs. These findings suggest that the impact of behavioral climate interventions varies across audiences and target behaviors.

As Earth’s climate has varied strongly through geological time, studying the impacts of past climate change on biodiversity helps to understand the risks from future climate change. However, it remains unclear how paleoclimate shapes spatial variation in biodiversity. Here, we assessed the influence of Quaternary climate change on spatial dissimilarity in taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional composition among neighboring 200-kilometer cells (beta-diversity) for angiosperm trees worldwide. We found that larger glacial-interglacial temperature change was strongly associated with lower spatial turnover (species replacements) and higher nestedness (richness changes) components of beta-diversity across all three biodiversity facets. Moreover, phylogenetic and functional turnover was lower and nestedness higher than random expectations based on taxonomic beta-diversity in regions that experienced large temperature change, reflecting phylogenetically and functionally selective processes in species replacement, extinction, and colonization during glacial-interglacial oscillations. Our results suggest that future human-driven climate change could cause local homogenization and reduction in taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional diversity of angiosperm trees worldwide.

AbstractData capturing multiple axes of tree size and shape, such as a tree's stem diameter, height and crown size, underpin a wide range of ecological research—from developing and testing theory on forest structure and dynamics, to estimating forest carbon stocks and their uncertainties, and integrating remote sensing imagery into forest monitoring programmes. However, these data can be surprisingly hard to come by, particularly for certain regions of the world and for specific taxonomic groups, posing a real barrier to progress in these fields. To overcome this challenge, we developed the Tallo database, a collection of 498,838 georeferenced and taxonomically standardized records of individual trees for which stem diameter, height and/or crown radius have been measured. These data were collected at 61,856 globally distributed sites, spanning all major forested and non‐forested biomes. The majority of trees in the database are identified to species (88%), and collectively Tallo includes data for 5163 species distributed across 1453 genera and 187 plant families. The database is publicly archived under a CC‐BY 4.0 licence and can be access from: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6637599. To demonstrate its value, here we present three case studies that highlight how the Tallo database can be used to address a range of theoretical and applied questions in ecology—from testing the predictions of metabolic scaling theory, to exploring the limits of tree allometric plasticity along environmental gradients and modelling global variation in maximum attainable tree height. In doing so, we provide a key resource for field ecologists, remote sensing researchers and the modelling community working together to better understand the role that trees play in regulating the terrestrial carbon cycle.

While the physical dimensions of climate change are now routinely assessed through multimodel intercomparisons, projected impacts on the global ocean ecosystem generally rely on individual models with a specific set of assumptions. To address these single-model limitations, we present standardized ensemble projections from six global marine ecosystem models forced with two Earth system models and four emission scenarios with and without fishing. We derive average biomass trends and associated uncertainties across the marine food web. Without fishing, mean global animal biomass decreased by 5% (±4% SD) under low emissions and 17% (±11% SD) under high emissions by 2100, with an average 5% decline for every 1 °C of warming. Projected biomass declines were primarily driven by increasing temperature and decreasing primary production, and were more pronounced at higher trophic levels, a process known as trophic amplification. Fishing did not substantially alter the effects of climate change. Considerable regional variation featured strong biomass increases at high latitudes and decreases at middle to low latitudes, with good model agreement on the direction of change but variable magnitude. Uncertainties due to variations in marine ecosystem and Earth system models were similar. Ensemble projections performed well compared with empirical data, emphasizing the benefits of multimodel inference to project future outcomes. Our results indicate that global ocean animal biomass consistently declines with climate change, and that these impacts are amplified at higher trophic levels. Next steps for model development include dynamic scenarios of fishing, cumulative human impacts, and the effects of management measures on future ocean biomass trends.

Abstract Empathy for nature is considered a prerequisite for sustainable interactions with the biosphere. Yet to date, empirical research on how to stimulate empathy remains scarce. Here, we investigate whether future scenarios can promote greater empathy for the oceans. Using a pre‐post empathy questionnaire, participants (N = 269) were presented with an optimistic or a pessimistic future scenario for the high seas in a virtual reality (VR) or written format. Results showed that post‐test empathy levels were significantly higher than pre‐test levels, indicating that future scenarios fostered ocean empathy. We also find that the pessimistic scenario resulted in greater empathy levels compared to the optimistic scenario. Finally, we found no significant difference between the VR and written conditions and found that empathy scores significantly decreased 3 months after the initial intervention. As one of the first studies to empirically demonstrate the influence of a purposeful intervention to build ocean empathy, this article makes critical contributions to advancing research on future scenarios and offers a novel approach for supporting ocean sustainability. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

AbstractGlobal impact models represent process-level understanding of how natural and human systems may be affected by climate change. Their projections are used in integrated assessments of climate change. Here we test, for the first time, systematically across many important systems, how well such impact models capture the impacts of extreme climate conditions. Using the 2003 European heat wave and drought as a historical analogue for comparable events in the future, we find that a majority of models underestimate the extremeness of impacts in important sectors such as agriculture, terrestrial ecosystems, and heat-related human mortality, while impacts on water resources and hydropower are overestimated in some river basins; and the spread across models is often large. This has important implications for economic assessments of climate change impacts that rely on these models. It also means that societal risks from future extreme events may be greater than previously thought.