Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research,Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology

Climate policy is widely recognized as a key determinant of future emissions trajectories, yet the integration of diverging policy pathways into climate scenario frameworks remains limited. Shared Policy Assumptions (SPA), which describe future climate policy mixes, have received far less attention than Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) and Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP). Yet climate policy instruments differ in ambition, design, and governance logic, all of which shape mitigation outcomes. A more granular assessment of policy instruments in climate modelling is crucial to increase their validity. We address this gap by developing a novel SPA framework rooted in public policy and political science. We construct four ideal-typical SPA that vary in climate ambition and depth of state intervention: Green State, Ecological Republic, Market-Liberal State, and Conserving State. We illustrate the empirical operationalization of SPA through sector-specific policy mixes across energy, transport, buildings, agriculture and industry based on a case study of Swiss climate policy. We argue that using a more granular SPA framework in climate modelling would enhance its realism and policy relevance by enabling more nuanced assessments of climate policy pathways. Our framework contributes to more comprehensive and context-sensitive climate scenario development and provides a foundation for future work on quantifying policy impacts and expanding SPA to other national contexts.

Given increasing migration and cultural diversification in urban contexts, understanding how people with different cultural backgrounds use and perceive urban green areas is relevant for inclusive planning. This exploratory, context-specific study examines how park users categorized as Swiss and non-Swiss report motivations, emotions, and ecological preferences in four public parks in Zurich, Switzerland. Based on 100 face-to-face go-along interviews, the study applies a mixed-methods design combining descriptive quantitative summaries with qualitative insights. Findings show shared appreciation for health-related benefits across both groups, alongside patterns of variation in reported motivations, emotional experiences, and preferences for vegetation structure. These patterns are discussed descriptively in relation to a simple Swiss vs. non-Swiss cultural background. The article contributes to urban studies by applying a three-dimensional framework—motivational, emotional, and ecological—that considers vegetation characteristics alongside reported user experiences, offering context-specific insights into culturally differentiated park use in Zurich.

The capacity of trees to withstand intensifying hot drought events depends on the coordination between hydraulic safety and leaf thermoregulation, yet the limits of this coordination under chronic stress remain poorly understood. Here, we show that 5 y of chronic soil moisture limitation fundamentally constrains the capacity of leaves to maintain adequate thermoregulation. Focusing on two temperate tree species with contrasting water-use strategies, European beech (Fagus sylvatica) and downy oak (Quercus pubescens), which were subjected to a 5-y manipulation of soil moisture and air temperature, we tested how acclimation influences leaf thermoregulation, hydraulic safety margins (HSMs), thermal safety margins (TSMs), and leaf scorching. Under sustained heating with ample soil water availability, both species acclimated to maintain stable leaf temperature and positive TSMs despite warmer conditions, demonstrating that thermal acclimation is possible without hydraulic stress. By contrast, chronic soil drought narrowed HSMs and weakened evaporative cooling, reducing leaf thermoregulation capacity. When drought and heat co-occurred, stomatal closure triggered a runaway feedback loop: Impaired water transport led to loss of cooling, causing breaching of critical thermal thresholds. These events coincided with failures of photosystem II and scorching in drought-vulnerable beech, linking drought-induced stomatal limitation directly to thermal injury. Our results reveal that oak and beech can acclimate to warming alone, but not to simultaneous heat and drought, which together drive a hydraulic-thermal cascade exceeding both safety margins. This interaction sets fundamental limits on the resilience of temperate forests to future hot droughts.

Floodplain habitat area and quality have decreased significantly over the last decades, mainly due to anthropogenic changes. Conservation efforts targeting floodplain species must consider changing climate when choosing suitable areas for restoration, especially for sessile organisms. Species distribution models, based on data from national and international databases on species’ occurrences and various environmental predictors, allow forecasting changes in species’ spatial distributions and facilitate planning at the catchment scale. Modelled predictions for floodplain organisms and communities suggest that current protected floodplains in Switzerland do not provide sufficient habitat and refugia for typical floodplain species and that climate-adapted conservation planning is needed which includes new areas. Similarly, visualisations of habitat which might potentially be occupied in the future can help to distinguish refugia from short-term sanctuaries. Temporal changes in water availability, for example, during periods of droughts, are likely to further lead to local habitat decrease of floodplain plant communities, as can be shown in hydrological models at reach scale for the Rhine in Germany. In fragmented landscapes along rivers, protected areas can provide refuge for specialised terrestrial species and promote species conservation, as we report for a floodplain which was protected for 30 years. Future restoration projects at the reach scale should, therefore, include planning at the catchment level, as well as consider hydrological regimes at the reach scale, especially for sessile floodplain species’ conservation under changing climate. Highlights Floodplain communities are threatened, especially sessile species; Climate-driven species distribution models distinguish refugia and sanctuaries; Hydrological predictions under changing climate show shifts of habitat for riverine plants at the local scale; A case study from a protected area shows that it promotes floodplain biodiversity; Prioritisation of local restoration projects should be based on planning at the catchment scale.

Growing evidence has shown that, apart from local environmental factors, changes in landscape-level factors by accelerated land-use change can also shape soil pathogenic fungal diversity. However, the global representativeness of such patterns remains unclear. Here, we assess how pathogenic fungal diversity in 511 soil samples worldwide responds to landscape factors, including landscape complexity index based on eight landscape metrics and quantity of different land cover types across six spatial scales (i.e., surrounding landscape, 250 m to 10,000 m radii from the sampling coordinate). We find that while soil variables explain over half of the variance, pathogenic fungal alpha diversity increases with landscape complexity and crop cover proportion, but decreases with grass and tree cover proportion, together explaining 23.4% of the total variance. Landscape factors have weaker impacts on beta diversity, explaining 13.0% of the variance. Across spatial scales, grassland ecosystems exhibit increasingly stronger responses to landscape variables compared to forest ecosystems. Landscape factors have a higher relative contribution to root-associated fungi than leaf/fruit/seed-associated fungi. Our results emphasize the importance of local factors and the complementary role of landscape patterns in shaping global soil pathogenic fungal distributions, highlighting scale-dependent effects across ecosystems and fungal functional groups.