Mountain regions and the important ecosystem services they provide are considered to be very vulnerable to the current warming, and recent studies suggest that high-mountain environments experience more rapid changes in temperature than environments at lower elevations. Here we analysed weather records for the period 1975–2010 from the Eastern Italian Alps that show that warming occurred both at high and low elevations, but it was less pronounced at high elevations.

Safeguarding the world’s remaining forests is a high-priority goal. We assess the biophysical option space for feeding the world in 2050 in a hypothetical zero-deforestation world. We systematically combine realistic assumptions on future yields, agricultural areas, livestock feed and human diets. For each scenario, we determine whether the supply of crop products meets the demand and whether the grazing intensity stays within plausible limits. We find that many options exist to meet the global food supply in 2050 without deforestation, even at low crop-yield levels.

Wildlife conservation in human-dominated landscapes requires that we understand how animals, when making habitat-use decisions, obtain diverse and dynamically occurring resources while avoiding risks, induced by both natural predators and anthropogenic threats. Little is known about the underlying processes that enable wild animals to persist in densely populated human-dominated landscapes, particularly in developing countries.

Given the increasing impacts of flooding in Jakarta, methods for assessing current and future flood risk are required. In this paper, we use the Damagescanner-Jakarta risk model to project changes in future river flood risk under scenarios of climate change, land subsidence, and land use change. Damagescanner-Jakarta is a simple flood risk model that estimates flood risk in terms of annual expected damage, based on input maps of flood hazard, exposure, and vulnerability.