Abstract Australia is committed to achieving net‐zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050 and nature‐positive targets aligned with the Global Biodiversity Framework and Australia's National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan. Both commitments require changes in land use and management (e.g., reforestation) which could compromise agricultural production and adversely impact water availability. This study assesses the potential of Australia's land sector to simultaneously deliver on its commitments to national net‐zero emissions and biodiversity goals, while meeting increasing domestic and export demand for agri‐food production, without depleting catchment‐scale environmental flows below sustainable limits. Using the Land‐Use Trade‐Offs model version 2 (LUTO2), we simulated land‐use and management pathways across Australia through to 2050 balancing national‐scale optimization coverage with fine‐scale spatial and temporal detail. Our results show that, under specific modeled scenarios and assumptions of policy support and technology adoption, ambitious GHG emissions and biodiversity targets could be theoretically achieved alongside rising agricultural demand. However, achieving the most ambitious targets in practice would require the conversion of 77.73 Mha of livestock land to non‐agricultural uses by 2050, alongside the implementation of agricultural management solutions across 97.49 Mha of cropland. Notably, non‐agricultural land uses such as Environmental plantings (mixed native species) emerged as critical for simultaneously delivering biodiversity and GHG emissions targets. These findings define a theoretical feasibility envelope for policymakers, landholders, environmental planners, and industry stakeholders, informing decisions about the type of changes in land‐use and management required to support a sustainable, productive, and economically viable transition toward a nature positive net‐zero future for Australia.
Abstract Climate change and rapid urbanization are intensifying flood risks, making unequal gray‐green infrastructure (GGI) provision a growing concern for extreme rainfall‐flood resilience (ERFR). However, how GGI inequality corresponds with ERFR differences between mainstream and tributary cities remains insufficiently understood. Using the 2025 Typhoon Wutip period as a fixed regional extreme‐event observation window, this study quantified GGI inequality and examined basin‐scale ERFR differentiation in southern China's Pearl River Basin (PRB). Representing GGI through drainage networks and aggregate urban green‐space provision, we combined the Gini coefficient with a machine‐learning‐based “flood sensitivity‐infrastructure vulnerability” framework to map basin‐wide ERFR and examine GGI‐ERFR relationships among 23 representative cities across hydrological and developmental contexts. Results revealed pronounced inequality in GGI provision. Mainstream cities generally exhibited higher green‐space ratios and drainage‐network densities, whereas tributary cities had more limited built‐up area‐based infrastructure provision. Correspondingly, ERFR exhibited marked spatial differentiation, with higher values concentrated in urban clusters, including the Pearl River Delta, and lower values more widely distributed across inland mountainous tributary areas. Built‐up area‐based GGI indicators showed the most pronounced inequality () and were strongly associated with ERFR (; ). Together, GGI concentration corresponded closely with the spatially heterogeneous distribution of ERFR across mainstream and tributary settings. These findings highlight the importance of directing infrastructure investment toward under‐resourced tributary areas and provide insights for hydrologically differentiated resilience governance in rapidly urbanizing river basins.
Abstract The United States (US) summer warming hole, marked by muted warming or cooling in maximum dry‐bulb temperature ( T max ) across parts of the central and southeastern US, is a regional exception to broader warming. However, T max does not capture atmospheric total heat content when humidity changes simultaneously. Using ERA5 reanalysis from 1950 to 2020, we examine summer trends in T max , maximum wet‐bulb temperature ( T w ,max ), and maximum equivalent temperature ( T e ,max ) across the contiguous US (CONUS). The dry‐bulb warming hole strengthens from June to August, yet humidity‐sensitive metrics show sustained increases across many of the same areas. Decomposing T e into temperature and humidity contributions shows that rising specific humidity offsets or exceeds weak or negative T max trends throughout much of the warming hole region. In the moistening core of the region, a latent heat contribution of order +0.5°C decade −1 accompanies near‐zero dry‐bulb trends. This opposition between sensible and latent contributions makes the warming hole fundamentally metric‐dependent. Moist‐heat amplification co‐occurs with wetting soil moisture, rising latent heat flux, and shallower boundary layers, whereas the most strongly drying regions show boundary‐layer deepening and a negative humidity contribution. The US warming hole thus reflects a shift in heat exposure from sensible toward latent forms, linking regional heat‐risk assessment to humidity, soil moisture, and boundary‐layer processes.
Abstract The Arabian/Persian Gulf contains more than half of the world's proven oil reserves and is a critical hub for global energy transport, yet it faces increasing oil spill risk from intense tanker traffic, geopolitical tensions, and clandestine oil smuggling operations. At the same time, the region is among the most water‐scarce globally and relies heavily on seawater desalination, making desalination plants and oil and gas (O&G) export terminals highly vulnerable to marine oil pollution. Here we combine backward‐in‐time oil spill dispersal simulations for 2016–2022 with marine traffic data to identify offshore areas from which spills are most likely to impact these infrastructures. Oil spill vulnerability shows strong seasonal variability, with northwesterly Shamal winds driving pollution toward the southeastern Gulf, particularly affecting facilities in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar. Two major high‐risk zones emerge: a southwestern corridor linking Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, and the UAE, and a northeastern hotspot along the UAE coastline. We find that about 19% of the Gulf's surface constitutes a high‐risk area from which spilled oil could reach key water or energy infrastructures in less than 3 days. These short transport times highlight the limited window for spill detection and response and underscore the need for improved monitoring, forecasting, and international coordination.
Abstract Irrigation‐induced evapotranspiration (IrrET), the atmospheric flux of irrigation water consumption (IWC), is commonly treated as local freshwater depletion, yet where this water returns as precipitation through atmospheric recycling remains poorly quantified. Here, we develop a high‐resolution estimate of China's IrrET and combine it with Lagrangian moisture tracking to quantify its contribution to local and remote precipitation. This approach identifies where water vapor originating from IrrET contributes to precipitation, rather than simulating the dynamical precipitation response to irrigation. IrrET was estimated from the residual between satellite‐based evapotranspiration and ERA5‐Land baseline evapotranspiration, while accounting for inter‐dataset biases and irrigated cropland fraction. The resulting IrrET estimates showed strong agreement with prefecture‐level IWC statistics after calibration ( R = 0.91, Rbias = −6%, root mean square error = 0.28 km 3 yr −1 ). During 2008–2017, China's IrrET contributed 189.5 km 3 yr −1 to precipitation, of which 65% fell over land, including 47% within China and 18% over neighboring terrestrial regions. Moisture tracking further revealed contrasting regional source–sink relationships, with the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau and Loess Plateau receiving net atmospheric water inputs, whereas the remaining zones acted as net atmospheric water exporters. China's IrrET increased at a rate of 2.8 km 3 yr −2 during 2000–2020, mainly due to irrigated‐area expansion. This increase was associated with an additional 73.6 km 3 of attributed precipitation under fixed climatological source–sink relationships. These results link local irrigation water depletion with regional moisture recycling and show that atmospheric redistribution should be considered when assessing irrigation sustainability in coupled human–water–climate systems.
