Scientists’ warning to humanity: microorganisms and climate change
By R. Cavicchioli, W. J. Ripple, K. Timmis, Farooq Azam, Lars R. Bakken, Matthew Baylis, Michael J. Behrenfeld, Antje Boetius, Philip W. Boyd, Aimée T. Classen and 23 more. Nature Reviews Microbiology, 2019
1,121 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In the Anthropocene, in which we now live, climate change is impacting most life on Earth. Microorganisms support the existence of all higher trophic life forms. To understand how humans and other life forms on Earth (including those we are yet to discover) can withstand anthropogenic climate change, it is vital to incorporate knowledge of the microbial ‘unseen majority’. We must learn not just how microorganisms affect climate change (including production and consumption of greenhouse gases) but also how they will be affected by climate change and other human activities. This Consensus Statement documents the central role and global importance of microorganisms in climate change biology. It also puts humanity on notice that the impact of climate change will depend heavily on responses of microorganisms, which are essential for achieving an environmentally sustainable future. The microbial majority with which we share Earth often goes unnoticed despite underlying major biogeochemical cycles and food webs, thereby taking a key role in climate change. This Consensus Statement highlights the importance of climate change microbiology and issues a call to action for all microbiologists.
Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/574269802f9be1119c5c2fb917546ea2888509d6
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Citations in the corpus
- Comparative analysis of diversity and environmental niches of soil bacterial, archaeal, fungal and protist communities reveal niche divergences along environmental gradients in the Alps (2021, background): “than in macro-organisms, potentially allowing faster acclimation and adaptation to changing environmental conditions (Cavicchioli et al., 2019).”
- Microbiome definition re-visited: old concepts and new challenges (2020, background): “First, studies indicate that they change functional and genetic diversity of the entire microbiota; however, more knowledge on the impact of these anthropogenic factors on different microbiomes and their consequences for our planet is definitively necessary [11].”