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Riverine systems act as converging pathways for discarded litter within drainage basins, becoming key elements in gauging the transfer of mismanaged waste into the ocean. However, riverine litter data are scarce and biased towards microplastics, generally lacking information about larger items. Based on the first ever database of riverine floating macrolitter across Europe, we have estimated that between 307 and 925 million litter items are released annually from Europe into the ocean. The plastic fraction represented 82% of the observed litter, mainly fragments and single-use items (that is, bottles, packaging and bags). Our modelled estimates show that a major portion of the total litter loading is routed through small-sized drainage basins (<100 km2), indicating the relevance of small rivers, streams and coastal run-off. Moreover, the major contribution of high-income countries to the macrolitter inputs suggests that reducing ocean pollution cannot be achieved only by improving waste management, but also requires changing consumption habits and behaviour to curb waste generation at source. The inability of countries with well-developed recovery systems to control the leakage of waste into the environment further supports the need to regulate the production and use of plastic on a global scale. We acknowledge the additional members (coordinators and observers) of RiLON, listed in Supplementary Data 5, for their support in the field data collection and feedback during the data quality control. D.G.-F. was supported by the JRC institutional exploratory project RIMMEL (272346), PLASTREND (BBVA Foundation) and the European Union (H2020-MSCA-IF-2018 846843 - LitRivus). J.V. and C.M.-C. were supported by the MIDaS project (Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, CTM2016-77106-R, AEI/FEDER/UE). Peer reviewed

Building a climate-ready adaptation society is an urgent question that cannot be postponed. Along the path towards an increase in climate resilience, a stimulating role is played by EU projects as well as by international climate networks such as the Covenant of Mayors Initiative on Climate Change Adaptation (Mayors Adapt), launched in 2014, and the new Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy which "pledge to reduce CO2 emissions by at least 40% by 2030 and to adopt an integrated approach to tackling mitigation and adaptation to climate change". These initiatives stimulate engagement and networking among cities and raise public awareness encouraging policy makers to take action to adapt to climate change. Adaptation operates at different spatial and societal scales. Accordingly, the development of climate change adaptation strategies requires a holistic and multi-perspective approach with scale-specific studies. This paper provides an overview of adaptation initiatives undertaken in 11 South East European countries participating in the SEE OrientGate project, with reference to the policies and measures promoted by the EU and implemented at national level. In particular, a cross-sectoral policy analysis is performed and an inclusive representation of measures and policies undertaken by countries with an interdisciplinary approach is provided. The analysis of the country measures reveals that unless national governments and local communities are concerned with the impacts of climate change only few of the countries included in the analysis have developed a comprehensive National Adaptation Strategy and a National Action Plans. Nevertheless, almost all the countries have undertaken adaptation actions across sectors. Although these actions have only partially generated a full commitment towards climate adaptation, they attest an increasing awareness as well as a high involvement of national and local authorities that will boost cooperation among stakeholders to find out innovative solutions to strengthen society and protect the environment.

AbstractResearch in global change ecology relies heavily on global climatic grids derived from estimates of air temperature in open areas at around 2 m above the ground. These climatic grids do not reflect conditions below vegetation canopies and near the ground surface, where critical ecosystem functions occur and most terrestrial species reside. Here, we provide global maps of soil temperature and bioclimatic variables at a 1‐km2resolution for 0–5 and 5–15 cm soil depth. These maps were created by calculating the difference (i.e. offset) between in situ soil temperature measurements, based on time series from over 1200 1‐km2pixels (summarized from 8519 unique temperature sensors) across all the world's major terrestrial biomes, and coarse‐grained air temperature estimates from ERA5‐Land (an atmospheric reanalysis by the European Centre for Medium‐Range Weather Forecasts). We show that mean annual soil temperature differs markedly from the corresponding gridded air temperature, by up to 10°C (mean = 3.0 ± 2.1°C), with substantial variation across biomes and seasons. Over the year, soils in cold and/or dry biomes are substantially warmer (+3.6 ± 2.3°C) than gridded air temperature, whereas soils in warm and humid environments are on average slightly cooler (−0.7 ± 2.3°C). The observed substantial and biome‐specific offsets emphasize that the projected impacts of climate and climate change on near‐surface biodiversity and ecosystem functioning are inaccurately assessed when air rather than soil temperature is used, especially in cold environments. The global soil‐related bioclimatic variables provided here are an important step forward for any application in ecology and related disciplines. Nevertheless, we highlight the need to fill remaining geographic gaps by collecting more in situ measurements of microclimate conditions to further enhance the spatiotemporal resolution of global soil temperature products for ecological applications.