Pledges made in Glasgow at the recent United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP26, are urgently needed by communities on the front lines of forest loss, according to a new study by a multidisciplinary team from the University of Washington, Duke University and The Nature Conservancy. New research shows how much local temperature rises in the tropics — compounded by accelerating deforestation — may already be jeopardizing the well-being and productivity of outdoor workers. 

Outdoor workers in the world’s lower-latitude tropical forests may face a greater risk of heat-related deaths and unsafe working conditions because of deforestation and climate warming, according to a study led by The Nature Conservancy, the University of Washington and Indonesia’s Mulawarman University. In the study, researchers found that increased temperatures of 0.95 C (1.7 F) in the deforested areas of Berau Regency, Indonesia, between 2002 and 2018 were linked to roughly 118 additional deaths in 2018, and 20 additional minutes of daily conditions too hot for humans to work in safely. 

A new effort to reconstruct Earth’s climate since the last ice age, about 24,000 years ago, highlights the main drivers of climate change, and how far out of bounds human activity has pushed the climate system. The University of Arizona-led study uses a technique for reconstructing past temperatures developed by co-authors at the University of Washington. The study, published Nov. 10 in Nature, has three main findings: It verifies that the main drivers of climate change since the last ice age are rising greenhouse gas concentrations and the retreat of the ice sheets It suggests a general warming trend over the last 10,000 years — settling a decade-long debate in the paleoclimatology community about whether this period trended warmer or cooler The magnitude and rate of warming over the last 150 years far surpasses the magnitude and rate of changes at any other time over the last 24,000 years “Paleoclimate records provide the only record we have of these past climates, but these records are imperfect and they have gaps in space and time.