On 13 September 2012, the Okhimath region in Rudraprayag district, Uttarakhand was revisited by cloudburstinduced landslides which killed 66 people and damaged land and property.(Correspondence)

Analysis of data from forest plants worldwide shows that margins between threshold xylem pressures at which plants suffer damage and the lowest xylem pressures experienced are small, with no difference between dry and wet forests, providing insight into why drought-induced forest decline is occurring in both arid and wet forests.

Risks from extreme weather events are mediated through state, civil society and individual action. We propose evolving social contracts as a primary mechanism by which adaptation to climate change proceeds. We use a natural experiment of policy and social contexts of the UK and Ireland affected by the same meteorological event and resultant flooding in November 2009. We analyse data from policy documents and from household surveys of 356 residents in western Ireland and northwest England.

As the world’s largest distributed store of fresh water, ground water plays a central part in sustaining ecosystems and enabling human adaptation to climate variability and change. The strategic importance of ground water for global water and food security will probably intensify under climate change as more frequent and intense climate extremes (droughts and floods) increase variability in precipitation, soil moisture and surface water.

Groundwater recharge sustains the groundwater resources on which there is global dependence for drinking water and
irrigated agriculture. For many communities, groundwater is the only perennial source of water. Here, we present a newly
compiled 55-year record of groundwater-level observations in an aquifer of central Tanzania that reveals the highly episodic occurrence of recharge resulting from anomalously intense seasonal rainfall.